A 


et igh anes arasd Bish ue PECL ELE hes Ni eG 5 
ASSESS eee he ea 
i. i a To 


+ 
“ 
~ 


Saas hot 
Corea) SESS 


xt ire ees 
tz SSR ts Rees ee ee: Hs ale are 
i Bh Ki ea aly j ine SO oa 
OG ar ONE ive ffore? if pie EF ae 
se NERA rion Bis ae 
Ps SRA sa Le ‘3 
erie? . Peles eieetestys $4 es i 
- RAG HUSUNI I 
AN Enos Rast ag he & Lys 
Eyth Sah yainatwilesta teen catty rast eta | tas 
Se eS ae 
rf 4 : Me {5 ey 4 Care es ee aay 
aaNet i eanaeh i a canal te 
Aer soseeeany tats ie agora Cia pana BG caeises Seton FAST tes ie 
Le TO aD: ee Meo a nee 
PAHS aS aaa tn Aras sete OYE oss a eat seeucet bazar aster tics 
ES OU Cag aati estas Na dareteu ea EUS TESRENO RTE 
Mi agitgetcyerises beste Bree SUSECTINE Posse Shas (4 bts tases Deki Mi SRN ARTES ars hae 
ey a. a 
ihre o Be Pay Bitte Biesiee fy He i Mas DSHeRSCoR eae SeTa if ESE PSR Fas tf a 
rs. ' . Bis oO age StS % 
; rae Seabed ie ; ee arate Hee a Pa 
sue re tutor ETL terete sits te rhe Sts Dhan heed ot Se 
ePiuceravtes oe ee be ee tide 
: 18 sity 2523 Wee eslesti seine rests 4 tei co # 
ae +H 207 . 3 eS ts ee eee Eero SA aSEry: AES EM aigvee by 
:y east eects bee aes BYR pestis fe? pita erie if Peabit trsekectoseoesl Be LET 
FES eae Gaara an eats oa su Hae ORC ara ae irra A I 
Pave ate ise ues aes pte DSA ate 
US Bc DENIM NR NAG iepteal get ONES aR 
HEA SH ib Seg 4 pe dee Ue) ; ore ee fiferee spery 
Phe i Apteah Ss Beysechers Ee, ea, ies rareeas ie abrees 
ST 6 iene Sas ish 45 rested cag 
i Raps : S $ vate f ‘iat ity ie ee aes Hts sath <rot ispe34 aS 
. ee 


is ni 
eas ape ae U ee TAs ie Fea 
CU 
$32 bey BE Ve ey eee de ee 
le ie ve Ge) Ae De 4 


eh 
na 
re 


“hee, 
fos 
a 
se 
pet 
moh 


ea 


< 
as 


ca 


> 
%! 
ne 


fa 
— RR 


Perr 
gre ey 


ae 
a ee uF 
bs sora aD 


i: 
Me Lae aeR 
a Py ; TAI i ‘3 as Kee seh Beate 
a i ce Bh pie Aa oe e 3 
ie he [ — i e, a 
Kaas ac} ieee Be rues bs 


0 


ae Wah re ae popturteeis’ te 
ale SELFETSACTERS, PRES LIES Pa 
ae : ne 2 a ne 4 


ie 
eee Ae ayes PANY: or D) 
Ate ek . ee 
at i Siete By ahs 
vet ; Heo Mth pat i a 
ts by BES ois ieee ett eee ee 
ye ate fe Me Be ; H pes Set Site, eae “te 
Bi pike as ff ah ee a i i steers ee BN i 5 
bd Bai ao GU UAU atta TA at Nie Apa epoca , 
sate as heen a ee TUE MORENO aS yi 
vb OBS ite Beste athe WAG RCO eae NE Raves ne Rone aD 
ieee Rete 6550 ee 4 uJ LAN ey LAMINA TAN 
eat te ie ti LRN S, Sen ate an Baie 
aS Heys Seok ne aancdey recta EE Hiss 
is i BOARS ION * 
ry . ates 1 Ris iee oi fe i se sa f tis 
op ee ANIA aT rae Cine aes e 
. $ dma siehclon IRVIN Tes us he 
BOR iene erst RETA seg EC e 
| iA 5 $0 tite ta + Pipe : zh ; 
ui x EIN OS ps 14 SETA. a 
ah a iY ee ia ne B URES a i ike 
Bara NAM REIN oI See ee ae yes 
we Sol ex a i enh 
Ba ripite ps cae : fe aa ey Be s A a iB Ae ae i hy ee vi ++ 
Me ae ate tin sesaget AZAR oy ee AS 2 a Ne Pye: Sieh i a isthe 43 ry eS 
5 NSate Rina ai REN ARTE AN AEN Lae i ANA ea oe Dato sagre ha RIS amar asrees Wy 
; ee age } a aint ue a a ae 2 a ae Leet bi 
RA SaaS Se A sett . Plenty ua.tes BRAY ueNobel sceaU Ss SeaEH Late ttt eheeh ote Eb i 
7 4 ah ai Bee sf ae vey Meveth en, OH a a ae Be fi 
cid RE be een Trent ibs BB en yrs ies Syitty Bras 
ote REN ne 2 Gey Awan Hs Ae 5 BN 
Atal eRIIUON eet eh Ree Ghctre fies a dea tee fs 
aa sinas i f : 4 nee GeAu any a seh ae fe -, 
es BM Ce ee SAN RE OF tne Doe HR 
a ba BGs E oe may 
petty 1 ites i! i 
a re VERtevECt TN vavites 
seb Z se aie ao BO isk 
vioes ve x THEY up ae 
reese ab A a 
ws : wie Ave A 
fi j 3 es S533 : 
lesa, i i i iG ae ity ue 
Uriet i wy i peat taes rs Ain ee ate SaeN 
eso a PON ia a . 
seh) Urs ty, ean x a * 
vat sips Pitrastatahts fee He 
ne Bo as 
estates niet oe a 
eae < Lapeer any Bane . ‘ as 


ona 


a 


say 


oe 


Wreoets 


one 


net ati 


S54 


ie ne o 
re ie ee she rat 
Ser 33 peas 


theot 


e 


Cy 
) 


From the Library of 
Urofessor Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield 
Beyueathed by him to 
the Library of 


Princeton Cheological Seminary 


2 PSS aS tes : 


_ 


» ¥ 
ut) 


cL . a4) on 


i ‘ ~* a - ‘ oo 
+6) sie et le Re As 


LANGUAGE 


AND 


THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE 


BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 


ORIENTAL AND LINGUISTIC STUDIES. 
The Veda: The Avesta: The Science of Language, 


One vol. crown 8vo, with an Index, cloth, a) cd Bah 2eSOC 


Sent, postpaid, on receipt of price, by the publishers, 


SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & SO,, Publishers, 
654 Broadway, New York. 


_———. 


LANGUAGE 


AND 


ae | G5 


THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE: 


TWELVE LECTURES 
ON THE 


PRINCIPLES OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE 


BY 


"4 
WILLIAM DWIGHT WHITNEY, 


PROLESSOR OF SANSKRIT AND INSTRUCTOR IN MODERN LANGUAGES 
IN YALE COLLEGE. 


FIFTH EDITION, 


NEW YORK: 


SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO,, 
654 BROADWAY. 


1874. 


Rutered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER & COMPANY, 
tn the Clerk’s O4tice of the District Court of the United States for ths 
Bouthern District of New York, 


Joun F. Trow & Son, 
PRINTERS AND BOOKBINDEKS, 
205-213 ast 12th St., 
NEW YORK. 


TO 
JAMES HADLEY, 
PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN YALE COLLEGE, 
Tas FRUIT OF STUDIES WHICH HE HAS DONE MORZ 
TMAN ANY ONE ELSE TO ENCOURAGE AND AID 


it AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED, 


PREFACE. 


THE main argument of the following work was first 
drawn out in the form of six lectures ‘‘ On the Principles 
of Linguistic Science,” delivered at the Smithsonian Insti- 
tution, in Washington, during the month of March, 1864. 
Of these, a brief abstract was printed in the Annual 
Report of the Institution published in the same year.* 
In the following winter (December, 1864, and January, 
1865) they were again delivered as one of the regular 
courses before the Lowell Institute, in Boston, having 
been expanded into a series of twelve lectures. They are 
now laid before a wider public, essentially in their form as 
there presented. But they have been in the mean time 
carefully rewritten, and have suffered a not inconsiderable 
further expansion, as the removal of the enforced Pro- 
crustean limit, of sixty minutes to a lecture, has given 
opportunity to discuss with greater fulness important 
points in the general argument which had before come off 
with insufficient treatment. The chief matter of theory 
upon which my opinion has undergone any noteworthy 
modification is the part to be attributed to the onomato- 
poetic principle in the first steps of language-making (see 
the eleventh lecture). ‘To this principle, at each revision 


* Report for 1863, pp. 95.—116. 


(v) 


v1 PREFACE. 


of my views, I have been led to assign a higher and 
higher efficiency, partly by the natural effect of a deeper 
study and clearer appreciation of the necessary conditions 
of the case, partly under the influence of valuable works 
upon the subject, recently issued.* In the general style 
of presentation I have not thought it worth while to make 
any change—not even to cast out those recapitulations 
and repetitions which are well-nigh indispensable in a 
course of lectures meant for oral delivery, though they 


may and should be avoided in a work intended from the 


outset for continuous reading and study. 

More than one of the topics here treated have been 
from time to time worked up separately, as communica- 
tions to the American Oriental Society, and are concisely 
reported in its Proceedings; also, within no long time 
past, I have furnished, by request, to one or two of our 
leading literary periodicals, papers upon special themes 
in linguistic science which were, to no small extent, 
virtual extracts from this work. 

The principal facts upon which my reasonings are 
founded have been for some time past the commonplaces 
of comparative philology, and it was needless to refer for 
them to any particular authorities: where I have consci- 
ously taken results recently won by an individual, and to 
be regarded as his property, I have been careful to 
acknowledge it. It is, however, my duty and my pleasure 
here to confess my special obligations to those eminent 
masters in linguistic science, Professors Heinrich Steinthal 
of Berlin and August Schleicher of Jena, whose works f 

* T will refer only to Mr Farrar’s “Chapters on Language” (London, 


1865), and to Professor Wedgwood’s little book, ‘On the Origin of Lan- 
guage” (London, 1866). 


t As chief among them, I would mention Steinthal’s “ Charakteristik der 


PREFACR, Vil 


I have had constantly upon my table, and have freely 
consulted, deriving from them great instruction and 
enlightenment, even when I have been obliged to differ 
most strongly from some of their theoretical views. Upon 
them I have been dependent, above all, in preparing my 
eighth and ninth lectures ;* my independent acquaintance 
with the languages of various type throughout the world 
being far from sufficient to enable me to describe them at 
frst hand. I have also borrowed here and there an illus- 
tration from the “ Lectures on the Science of Language” 
of Professor Max Miiller, which are especially rich in such 
material. . 

To my friend Professor Fitz-Hdward Hall, Librarian 
of the Hast India Office in London, I have to return my 
thanks for his kindness in undertaking the burdensome 
task of reading the revise of the sheets, as they went 
through the press. 

It can hardly admit of question that at least so much 
cnowledge of the nature, history, and classifications of 
language as is here presented ought to be included in 
every scheme of higher education, even for those who do 
not intend to become special students in comparative phil- 
ology. Much more necessary, of course, is it to those who 
cherish such an intention. It is, I am convinced, a mis- 
take to commence at once upon a course of detailed com- 
parative philology with pupils who have only enjoyed the 
ordinary training in the classical or the modern languages, 


Hauptsichlichsten Typen des Sprachbaues” (Berlin, 1860), and Schleicher’s 
“Compendium der Vergleichenden Grammatik der Indogermanischen Spra- 
chen” (Weimar, 1861; a new edition has appeared this year): other writings 
of both authors, of less extent and importance, are referred to by name in the ° 
marginal notes upon the text. 

* I should mention also my indebtedness, as regards the Semitic lan- 
guages, to the admirable work of M. Ernest Renan, the “ Histoire Générale 
des Langues Sémitiques”’ (seconde édition, Paris, 1858). 


vill PREFACE. 


or in both. They are liable either to fail of apprehending 
the value and interest of the infinity of particulars into 
which they are plunged, or else to become wholly absorbed 
in them, losing sight of the grand truths and principles 
which underlie and give significance to their work, and 
the recognition of which ought to govern its course 
throughout: perhaps even coming to combine with acute- 
ness and erudition in etymological investigation views 
respecting the nature of language and: the relations of 
languages of a wholly crude or fantastic character. I am 
not without hope that this book may be found a conve- 
nient and serviceable manual for use in our higher institu- 
tions of learning. I have made its substance the basis of 
my own instruction in the science of language, in Yale Col- 
lege, for some years past ; and, as it appears to me, with 
gratifying success. In order to adapt it to such a pur- 
pose, I have endeavoured to combine a strictly logical 
and scientific plan with a popular mode of handling, and 
with such illustration of the topics treated as should be 
easily and universally apprehensible. If, however, the 
lecture style should be found too discursive and argu- 
mentative for a text-book of instruction, I may perhaps 
be led hereafter to prepare another work for that special 
use. 


Yate COLLEGE, 
Nevo Haven, Conn., 


August, 1867. 


REOT, 


CONTENTS. 


I, Infroductory: history, material, objects of linguistic science ; 


plan of these lectures. Fundamental inquiry. How we 
acquired our speech, and what it was; differences of indi- 
vidual speech, What is the English language; how kept 
in existence; its changes. Modes and causes of linguistic 
change, 


II. Nature of the force which produces the changes of language ; 


its modes of action. Language an institution, of his- 
torical growth; its study a moral science. Analogies of 
linguistic science with the physical sciences, Its methods 
historical. Etymology its foundation. Analysis of com- 
pound words. Genesis of affixes. Nature of all words as 
produced by actual composition. 


iI, Phonetic change; its ground, action on compound words, 


part in word-making, and destructive effects. Replace- 
ment of one mode of formal distinction by another. 
Extension of analogies. Abolition of valuable distine- 
tions. Conversion of sounds into one another, Physical 
characters of alphabetic sounds; physical scheme of the 
English alphabet. Obsolescence and loss of words. 
Changes of meaning ; their ground and methods. Variety 
of meanings of one word. Synonyms. Conversions of 
physical into spiritual meaning, Attenuation of mean- 
ing; production of form-words. Variety of derivatives 
from one root. Unreflectiveness of the process of making 
names and forms. Conceptions antedate their names. 
Reason of a name historical, and founded in convenience, 
not necessity. Insignificance of derivation in practical 
use of language. .. we 


2V, Varying rate and kind of linguistic growth, and causes affect. 


ing it. Modes of growth of the English language. In- 


PAGE 


id 


x CONTENTS. 


LECT.  PAGH 
fluences conservative of linguistic identity Causes pro- 
ducing dialects; causes maintaining, producing, or ex- 
tending homogeneity of speech. Illustrations: history 
of the German language 5 of the Latin; of the English. 

The English language in America. .. ‘ 3ia abo 


V. Erroneous views of the relations of dialects. Dialectic 
variety implies original unity. Effect of cultivation on a 
language. Grouping of languages by relationship. Nearer 
aud remoter relations of the English. Constitution of the 
Indo-European family. Proof of its unity. Impossibility 
of determining the place and time of its founders; their 
culture and customs, inferred from their restored vocabu- 
laryan en. ae 36 A te ee ts 


VI, Languages and literatures of the Germanic, Slavonic, Lithu- 
anic, Celtic, Italic, Greek, Iranian, and Indian branches 
of Indo-European speech. Interest of the family and its 
study ; historical importance of the Indo-European races ; 
their languages the basis of linguistic science. Method 
of linguistic research. Comparative philology. Errors 
of linguistic method or its application. ae oe? ae 


VII. Beginnings of Indo-European language. Actuality of linguis 
tic analysis. Roots, pronominal and verbal; ° their 
character as the historical germs of our language; devel- 
opment of inflective speech from them. Production of 
declensional, conjugational, and derivative apparatus, 
and of the parts of speech. Relation of synthetic and 
analytic forms. General character and course of inflective 
development. ie ie - Gk We Veae 


TIIL Families of languages, how established. Characteristic 
features of Indo-European language. Semitic family: its 
constitution, historic value, literatures, and linguistic 
character Relation of Semitic to Indo-European lan- 
guage. Scythian or Altaic family: its five branches: 
their history, literatures, and character. Unity of the 
family somewhat doubtful. ee oa .. 288 


IX. Uncertainties of genetic classification of languages. ‘ Tura- 
nian’”’ family. Dravidian group. North-eastern Asiatic. 
Monosyllabic tongues: Chinese, Farther Indian, Tibetan, 
ete. Malay-Polynesian and Melanesian families Egyptian 
language and its asserted kindred : Hamitic famity. Lan- 
guages of southern and central Africa. Languages of 
America: problem of derivation of American races. 
Isolated tongues: Basque, Caucasian, etc. a4 .. 822 


CONTENTS, 


LECT. PAGE 
X. Classification of languages. Morphological classifications ; 
their defects. Schleicher’s morphological notation. 
Classification by general rank. Superior value of genetic 
division. Bearing of linguistic science on ethnology. 
Comparative advantages and disadvantages of linguistic 
and physical evidence of race. Indo-European language 
and race mainly coincident. Difficulty of the ethnolo- 
gical problem. Inability of language to prove either unity 
or variety of human species. Accidental correspondences : 
futility of root comparisons. oe o- -. 356 


XI. Origin of language. Conditions of the problem. In what 
sense language is of divine origin. Desire of communi- 
* cation the immediate impulse to its production. Lan- 
guage and thought not identical. Thought possible 
without language. Difference of mental action in man 
and lower animals, Language the result and means of 
analytic thought, the aid of higher thought. The voice 
as instrument of expression. Acts and qualities the first 
things named. The ‘ bow-wow,’ ‘ pooh-pooh,’ and ‘ ding- 
dong’ theories. Onomatopcia the true source of first 
utterances. Its various modes and limitations. Its traces 
mainly obliterated. Remaining obscurities of the problem. 395 


XII. Why men alone can speak. Value of speech to man. Train- 
ing involved in the acquisition of language. Reflex in- 
fluence of language on mind and history. Writing the 
natura! aid and complement of speech. Fundamental 
idea of written speech. Its development. Symbolic and 
mnemonic objects. Picture writing. Egyptian hieroglyphs. 
Chinese writing. Cuneiform characters. Syllabic modes 
of writing. The Phenician alphabet and its descendants. 
Greek and Latin alphabets. English alphabet. English 
orthography, Rank of the English among languages. .. 4386 


=e 4 My. 


bag Soe oy Stele 


LANGUAGE 


AND 


THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. 


LECTURE LI. 


Introductory : history, material, objects of linguistic science; plan of 
these lectures. Fundamental inquiry. How we acquired our speech, 
and what it was; differences of individual speech. What is the English 
language ; how kept in existence; its changes. Modes and causes of 
linguistic change. 


THosE who are engaged in the investigation of language 
have but recently begun to claim for their study the rank 
and title of a science. Its development as such has been 
wholly the work of the present century, although its germs 
go back toa much more ancient date. It has had a history, 
in fact, not unlike that of the other sciences of observation 
and induction—for example, geology, chemistry, astronomy, 
physics—which the intellectual activity of modern times has 
built up upon the scanty observations and crude inductions 
of other days. Men have always been learning languages, 
in greater or less measure ; adding to their own mother- 
tongues the idioms of the races about them, for the practical 
end of communication with those races, of access to their 
thought and knowledge. There has, too, hardly been a time 
when some have not been led on from the acquisition of 
languages to the study of language. The interest of this 
precious and wonderful possession of man, at once the sign 
and the means of his superiority to the rest of the animal 

X 


Z HISTORY OF [LECT. 


creation, has in all ages strongly impressed the reflecting and 
philosophical, and impelled them to speculate respecting its 
nature, its history, and its origin. Researches into the 
genealogies and affinities of words have exercised the in- 
genuity of numberless generations of acute and inquiring 
minds. Moreover, the historical results attainable by such 
researches, the light cast by them upon the derivation 
and connection of races, have never wholly escaped re- 
cognition. The general objects and methods of linguistic 
study are far too obviously suggested, and of far too engaging 
interest, not to have won a certain share of regard, from 
the time when men first began to inquire into things and 
their causes. 

Nothing, however, that deserved the name of a science 
was the result of these older investigations in the domain of 
languags, any more than in those of chemistry and astronemy. 
Hasty generalizations, baseless hypotheses, inconclusive ce- 
ductions, were as rife in the former department of study as 
they were in the two latter while yet passing through the 
prelimimary stages of alchemy and astrology. The difficulty 
was in all the cases nearly the same; it lay in the paucity of 
observed facts, and in the faulty position which the inquirer 
assumed toward them. There had been no sufficient collec- 
tion and classification of phenomena, to serve as the basis of 
inductive reasoning, for the establishment of sound methods 

nd the elaboration of true results ; end along with this, and 
partly in consequence of it, prejudice and assumption had 
usurped the place of induction. National self-sufficiency and 
inherited prepossession long helped to narrow the limits 
imposed by unfavourable circumstances upon the extent of 
linguistic knowledge, restraining that liberality of inquiry 
which is indispensable to the growth of a science. Ancient 
peoples were accustomed to think each its own dialect the 
only true language; other tongues were to them mere bar- 
barous jargons, unworthy of study. Modern nations, in 
virtue of their history, their higher culture, and their Chris- 
tianity, have been much less uncharitably exclusive; and 
their reverence for the two classical idioms, the Greek and 
Latin, and for the language of the Old Testament, the He- 


1.] LINGUISTIC SCIENCE. 3 
brew, so widened their linguistic horizon as gradually to pre- 
pare the way for juster and more comprehensive views of 
the character and history of human speech. The restless 
and penetrating spirit of investigation, finally, of the nine- 
teenth century, with its insatiable appetite for facts, its 
tendency to induction, and its practical recognition of the 
unity of human interests, and of the absolute value of all 
means of knowledge respecting human conditions and his- 
tory, has brought about as rapid a development in linguistic 
study as in the kindred branches of physical study to which 
we have already referred. The truth being once recognized 
that no dialect, however rude and humble, is without worth, 
or without a bearing upon the understanding of even the 
most polished and cultivated tongues, all that followed was a 
matter of course. Linguistic material was gathered in from 
every quarter, literary, commercial, and philanthropic activity 
combining to facilitate its collection and thorough examina- 
tion. Ancient records were brought to, light and deci- 
phered ; new languages were dragged from obscurity and 
made accessible to study. 

The recognition, not long to be deferred when once atten- 
tion was turned in the right direction, of the special rela- 
tionship of the principal languages of Europe with one 
another and with the languages of south-western Asia—the 
establishment of the Indo-European family of languages— 
was the turning-point in this history, the true beginning of 
linguistic science. The great mass of dialects of the family, 
descendants of a common parent, covering a period of four 
thousand years with their converging lines of development, 
supplied just the ground which the science needed to grow 
up upon, working out its methods, getting fully into view 
its ends, and devising the means of their attainment. The 
true mode of fruitful investigation was discovered; it ap- 
peared that a wide and searching comparison of kindred 
idioms was the way in which to trace out their history, and 
arrive at a real comprehension of the life and growth of lan- 
guage. Comparative philology, then, became the handmaid 
of ethnology and history, the forerunner and founder of the 


science of human speech. 
1? 


Ay HISTORY OF [LECT, 


No single circumstance more powerfully aided the onward 
movement than the introduction to Western scholars of the 
Sanskrit, the ancient and sacred dialect of India. Its ex- 
ceeding age, its remarkable conservation of primitive 
material and forms, its unequalled transparency of structure, 
give it an indisputable right to the first place among the 
tongues of the Indo-European family. Upon their compari- 
son, already fruitfully begun, it cast a new and welcome 
light, displaying clearly their hitherto obscure relations, 
rectifying their doubtful etymologies, illustrating the laws 
of research which must be followed in their study, and 
in that of all other languages. What linguistic science 
might have become without such a basis as was afforded it 
in the Indo-European dialects, what Indo-European philology 
might have become without the help of the Sanskrit, it were 
idle to speculate: certain it is that they could not have 
grown so rapidly, or reached for a long time to come the 
state of advancement in which we now already behold them. 
As a historical fact, the scientific study of human speech is 
founded upon the comparative philology of the Indo-Eu- 
ropean languages, and this acknowledges the Sanskrit as its 
most valuable means and aid. 

But to draw out in detail the history of growth of lin- 
guistic science down to the present time, with particular notice 
of its successive stages, and with due mention of the scholars 
who have helped it on, does not lie within the plan of these 
lectures. Interesting as the task might be found, its execu- 
tion would require more time than we can spare from topics 
of more essential consequence.* A brief word or two is all 
we can afford to the subject. Germany is, far more than 
any other country, the birthplace and home of the study of 
language. There was produced, at the beginning of this 
century, the most extensive and important of the prelimi- 
nary collections of material, specimens of dialects with rude 
attempt at their classification—the “ Mithridates” of 
Adelung and Vater. There Jacob Grimm gave the first 
exemplification on a grand scale of the value and power of 


* For many interesting details, see Professor Max Miiller’s Lectures on 
the Science of Language, first series, third and fourth lectures. 


ic LINGUISTIC SCIENCE. 5 


the comparative method of investigation in language, in his 
grammar of the Germanic dialects, a work of gigantic labour, 
in which each dialect was made to explain the history and cha- 
racter of all, and all of each. There—what was of yet greater 
consequence— Bopp laid, in 1816, the foundation of Indo-Eu- 
ropean comparative philology, by his “ Conjugation-system of 
the Sanskrit Language, as compared with the Greek, Latin, 
Persian, and German; ” following it later with his Compara- 
tive Grammar of all the principal languages of the Indo- 
European family—a work which, more than any other, gave 
shape and substance to the science. There, too, the labours 
of such men as the Schlegels, Pott, and Wilhelm von Hum- 
boldt, especially of the last-named, extended its view and 
generalized its principles, making it no longer an investiga- 
tion of the history ofa single department of human speech, 
but a systematic and philosophical treatment of the pheno- 
mena of universal language and their causes. The names of 
Rask, too, the Danish scholar and traveller, and of Bur- 
nouf, the eminent French savant, must not be passed unno- 
ticed among those of the founders of linguistic science. 
Indeed, how ripe the age was for the birth of this new 
branch of human knowledge, how natural an outgrowth 
it was of the circumstances amid which it arose, is shown by 
the fact that its most important methods were worked out 
and applied, more or less fully, at nearly the same time, by 
several independent scholars, of different countries—by 
Rask, Bopp, Grimm, Pott, Burnouf. 

A host of worthy rivals and followers of the men whose 
names we have noted have arisen in all parts of Europe, and 
even in America, to continue the work which these had 
begun ; and by their aid the science has already attained a 
degree of advancement that’is truly astonishing, considering 
its so recent origin. Though still in its young and rapidly 
growing stage, with its domain but just surveyed and only 
partially occupied, its basis is yet laid broadly and deeply 
enough, its methods and laws are sure enough, the objects it 
aims at and the results it is yielding are sufficiently import- 
ant, in themselves and in their bearing upon other branches 
of human knowledge, to warrant it in challenging a place 


6 MATERIAL AND OBJECTS [LECT, 


among the sciences, as not the least worthy, though one 
of the youngest, of their sisterhood, and to give it a claim 
which may not be disregarded to the attention of every scho- 
lar, and of every well-educated person. 

The material and subject of linguistic science is language, 
in its entirety; all the accessible forms of human speech, in 
their infinite variety, whether still living in the minds and 
mouths of men, or preserved only in written documents, or 
carved on the scantier but more imperishable records of 
brass and stone. It has a field and scope limited to no age, 
and to no portion of mankind. The dialects of the obscurest 
aud most humbly endowed races are its care, as well as those 
of the leaders in the world’s history. Whenever and wher- 
ever a sound has dropped from the lips of a human being, 
to signalize to others the movements of his spirit, this science 
would fain take it up and study it, as having a character and 
office worthy of attentive examination. Every fact of ever 
language, in the view of the linguistic student, calls for his 
investigation, since only in the light of all can any be com- 
pletely understood. To assemble, arrange, and explain the 
whole body of linguistic phenomena, so as thoroughly to com- 
prehend them, in each separate part and under all aspects, 
is his endeavour. His province, while touching, on the one 

and, upon that of the philologist, or student of human 
thought and knowledge as deposited in literary records, and, 
on the other hand, upon that of the mere linguist, or learner 
of languages for their practical use, and while exchanging 
friendly aid with both of these, is yet distinct from either. 
He deals with language as the instrument of thought, its 
means of expression, not its record; he deals with simple 
words and phrases, not with sentences and texts. He aims 
to trace out the inner life of language, to discover its origin, 
to follow its successive steps of growth, and to deduce the 
laws that govern its mutations, the recognition of which 
shall account to him for both the unity and the variety of 
its present manifested phases ; and, along with this, to appre= 
hend the nature of language as a human endowment, its re- 
lation to thought, its influence upon the development of in. 


1. ] OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE. 7 


tellect and the growth of knowledge, and the history of mind 
and of knowledge as reflected in it. 

The exceeding interest of this whole class of inquiries is 
at first sight manifest, but it grows to our sense in measure 
as we reflect upon it. We are apt to take language, like so 
many other things of familiar daily use, as a thing of course, 
without appreciating the mystery and deep significance 
which belong to it. We clothe our thoughts without effort 
or reflection in words and phrases, having regard only to the 
practical ends of expression and communication, and the 
power conferred by them: we do not think of the long his- 
tory, of changes of form and changes of signification, through 
which each individual vocable employed by us has passed, of 
the labour which its origination and gradual elaboration has 
cost to successive generations of thinkers and speakers. We 
do not meditate upon the importance to us of this capacity 
of expression, nor consider how entirely the history of man 
would have been changed had he possessed no such faculty ; 
how little of that enlightenment which we boast would have 
been ours, if our ancestors had left no spoken memorial of 
their mental and spiritual acquisitions ; how, in short, with- 
out speech, the noble endowments of our nature would have 
remained almost wholly undeveloped and useless, It is, in- 
deed, neither to be expected nor desired that our minds 
should be continually penetrated with a realizing sense of 
the marvellous character of language; but we should be in- 
excusable if we neglected altogether to submit it to such an 
examination as should make us understand its nature and 
history, and should prepare our minds to grasp by reflection 
its whole significance. 

These and such as these are the objects most directly 
aimed at by the scientific student of language. But there 
are others, of a different character, to which his investiga- 
tions conduct him hardly less immediately, and which con- 
stitute an essential part of the interest which invests them. 
It is a truth now almost as familiar as, fifty years ago, it 
would have been deemed new and startling, that language 
furnishes the principal means of fruitful inquiry into the 


8 VALUE OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE. [LECT. 


deeds and fates of mankind during the ages which precede 
direct historical record. It enables us to determine, in the 
main, both the fact and the degree of relationship subsist- 
ing among the different divisions of mankind, and thus to 
group them together into families, the members of which 
must have once set forth from a common home, with a com- 
mon character and a common culture, however widely separ- 
ated, and however unlike in manners and institutions, we 
may find them to be, when they first come forth into the 
light of written history. Upon the study of language is 
mainly founded the science of ethnology, the science which 
investigates the genealogy of nations. I say, mainly found- 
ed, without wishing to depreciate the claims of physical 
science in this regard: the relation between linguistic and 
physical science, and their joint and respective value to eth- 
nology, will be made the subject of discussion at a point 
further on in our inquiries. But language is also pregnant 
with information respecting races which lies quite beyond 
the reach of physical science: it bears within itself plain 
evidences of mental and moral character and capacity, of de- 
gree of culture attained, of the history of knowledge, philo- 
sophy, and religious opinion, of intercourse among peoples, 
and even of the physical circumstances by which those who 
speak it have been surrounded. It is, in brief, a volume of 
the most varied historical information to those who know 
how to read it and to derive the lessons it teaches. 

To survey the whole vast field of linguistic science, taking 
even a rapid view of all the facts it embraces and the results 
derived from their examination, is obviously beyond our 
power in a brief series of lectures like the present. I shall 
not, accordingly, attempt a formally systematic presentation 
of the subject, laying out its different departments and de- 
fining their limits and mutual relations. It will, I am per- 
suaded, be more for our profit to discuss in a somewhat 
general and familiar way the fundamental facts in the life of 
language, those which exhibit most clearly its character, and 
cetermine the method of its study. We shall thus gain an 
Insight into the nature of linguistic evidence, see how it is 
eucited from the material containing it, and what and how 


1, PLAN OF THESE LECTURES. 9 


it as force to prove. We shall, in short, endeavour to 
arrive at an apprehension of the fundamental principles ot 
the science. But we shall also find occasion to glance at 
the main results accomplished by its means, seeking to un- 
derstand what language is and what is its value to man, and 
to recognize the great truths in human history which it has 
been instrumental in establishing. 

In order to these ends, we shall first take up one or two 
preliminary questions, the discussion of which will show us 
how language lives and grows, and how it is to be investi- 
gated, and will guide us to an understanding of the place 
which its study occupies among the sciences. We shall 
then go on to a more detailed examination and illustration 
of the processes of linguistic growth, and of the manner in 
which they produce the incessant changes of form and con- 
tent which language is everywhere and alw ays undergoing, 
We shall note, further, the various causes which affect the 
kind and rate of linguistic change. The result of these 
processes of growth, in bringing ‘about the separation of 
languages into dialects,” will next engage our attention. 
This will prepare us for a construction of the group of 
dialects, and the family of more distantly related languages, 
of which our own English speech is a member, and for an 
examination and estimate of the evidence which proves them 
related. The extent and importance, historical and lin- 
guistic, of this family will be set forth, and its course of de- 
velopment briefly sketched. We shall next pass in review 
the other great families into which the known forms of 
human speech are divided, noticing their most striking 
characteristics. Then will be taken up certain general 
questions, of prime interest and importance, suggested by 
such a review—as the relative value 2nd authority of lin- 
guistic and of physical evidence of race, and the bearing of lan- 
guage upon the ultimate question of the unity or variety of 
the human species. Finally, we shall consider the origin of 
language, its relation to thought, and its value as an element 
in human progress. And a recognition of the aid which it 
receives in this last respect from written and recorded 
speech will lead us, by way of appendix, to take a cursory 


19 METHOD OF TREATMENT. [ LECT. 


view of the historical development of the art of writing. 

The method which we shall follow will be, as much as 
possible, the analytic rather than the synthetic, the in- 
quiring rather than the doginatic. We shall strive, above 
all things, after clearness, and shall proceed always from 
that which is well-known or vbvious to that which is’ more 
recondite and obscure, establishing principles by induction 
from facts which lie within the cognizance of every well- 
educated person. For this reason, our examples, whether 
typical or illustrative, will be especially sought among the 
phenomena of our own familiar idiom; since every living 
and growing language has that within it which exemplifies 
the essential facts and principles belonging to all human 
speech. We shall also avoid, as far as 1s practicable, the 
use of figurative, metaphysical, or technical phraseology, 
endeavouring to talk the language of plain and homely fact. 
Not a little of the mystery and obscurity which, in the 
minds of many, inyest the whole subject of language, is due 
to the common employment respecting it of terms founded 
on analogies instead of facts, and calling up the things they 
represent surrounded and dimmed by a halo of fancy, in- 
stead of presenting sharply cut outlines and distinct linea- 
ments. 

The whole subject of linguistic investigation may be con- 
veniently summed up in the single inquiry, “ Why do we 
speak as we do?” The essential character of the study of 
language, as distinguished from the study of languages, lies 
in this, that it seeks everywhere, not the facts, but the rea- 
sous of them; it asks, not how we speak, or should speak, 
but for what reason; pursuing its search for reasons back to 
the very ultimate facts of human history, and down into the 
very depths of human nature. To cover the whole ground 
of investigation by this inquiry, it needs to be proposed in 
more than one sense; as the most fitting introduction to 
our whole discussion, let us put it first in its plainest and 
most restricted meaning: namely, why do we ourselves 
speak the English as our mother-tongue, or native language, 
instead of any other of the thousand varying forms of speech 
current among men? It is indeed a simple question, but ta 


1.] WHY WE SPEAK ENGLISH. 11 


answer t distinctly and truly will lay the best possible 
foundation for our further progress, clearing our way of 
more than one of the imperfect apprehensions, or the misap- 
prehensions, which are apt to encumber the steps of students 
of language. 

The general answer is so obvious as hardly to require to 
be pointed out: we speak English because we were taught 
it by those who surrounded us in our infancy and growing 
age. It is our mother-tongue, because we got it from the 
lips of our mothers ; it is our native language, inasmuch as 
we were born, not indeed into the possession of it, but into 
the company of those who already spoke it, having learned 
it in the same way before us. We were not left to our own 
devices, to work out for ourselves the great problem of how 
to talk. In our case, there was no development of language 
out of our own internal resources, by the reflection of 
phenomena in consciousness, or however else we may choose 
to describe it; by the action of a natural impulse, shaping 
ideas, and creating suitable expression for them. No sooner 
were our minds so far matured as to be capable of intelli- 
gently associating an idea and its sign, than we learned, 
first to recognize the persons and things about us, the most 
familiar acts and phenomena of our little world, by the names 
which others applied to them, and then to apply to them the 
Same names ourselves. Thus, most of us learned first of all 
to stammer the childish words for ‘ father’ and ‘ mother,’ put, 
for our convenience, in the accents easiest for unpractised 
lips to frame. Then, as we grew on, we acquired daily more 
and more, partly by direct instruction, partly by imitation: 
those who had the care of us contracted their ideas and sim- 
plified their speech to suit our weak capacities ; they watched 
with interest every new vocable which we mastered, cor- 
rected our numberless errors, explained what we but half 
understood, checked us when we used longer words and 
more ambitious phrases than we could employ correctly or 
wield adroitly, and drilled us in the utterance of sounds 
which come hard to the beginner. The kind and degree of 
the training thus given, indeed, varied greatly in different 
cases, as did the provision made for the necessary wants of 


12 HOW WE ACQUIRED [LECT. 


childhood in respect to other matters ; as, for ‘astance, the 
food, tue dress, the moral nurture. Just as some have te 
rough their way by the hardest through the wcenes of early 
life, beaten, half-starved, clad in scanty rags, while yet some 
care and provision were wholly indispensable, and no child 
could have lived through infancy without them—-so, as con- 
cerns language, some get but the coarsest and most meagre in- 
struction, and yet instruction enough to help them through 
the first stages of learning how to speak. ‘m the least 
favourable circumstances, there must have been constantly 
about every one of us in our earliest years an amount and 
style of speech surpassing our acquirements and beyond our 
reach, and our acquisition of language consisted in our ap- 
propriating more and more of this, as we were able. In 
proportion as our minds grew in activity and poyer of com- 
prehension, and our knowledge increased, our notions and 
conceptions were brought into shapes mainly agreeing with 
those which they wore in the minds of those around us, 
and received in our usage the appellations to which the latter 
were accustomed. On making acquaintance with certain 
liquids, colourless or white, we had not to go through a pro- 
cess of observation and study of their properties, im order to 
devise suitable titles for them; we were taught that these 
were water and milk. The one of them, when standing 
stagnant in patches, or rippling between green banks, we 
learned to call, according to circumstances and the prefer- 
ence of our instructors, pool or puddle, and brook or river. 
An elevation rising blue in the distance, or towering nearer 
above us, attracted our attention, and drew from us the staple 
inquiry “ What is that? °—the answer, “A mountain,” or 
“A hill,” brought to our vocabulary one of the innumerable 
additions which it gained in a like way. Along with the 
names of external sensible objects, we thus learned also that 
prectical classification of them which our language recog- 
nizes: we learned to distinguish brook and river; hill and 
mountain ; tree, bush, vine, shrub, and plant; and so on, in 
cases without number, In like manner, among the various 
acts which we were capable of performing, we were taught 
t> designate certain ones by specific titles: much reproof, 


1.] OUR MOTHER-TONGUE. 13 


for instance, doubtless made us early understand what was 
meant by cry, strike, push, kick, bite, and other names for 
misdeeds incident to even the best-regulated childhood. 
How long our own mental states might have remained a 
confused and indistinct chaos to our unassisted reflection, 
we do not know; but we were soon helped to single out and 
recognize by appropriate appellations certain ones among 
them: for example, a warm feeling of gratification and at- 
tachment we were made to signify by the expression love ; 
an inferior degree of the same feeling by like ; and their 
opposite by hate. Long before any process of analysis and 
combination carried on within ourselves would have given 
us the distinct conceptions of true and false, of good and 
naughty, they were carefully set before us, and their due ap- 
prehension was enforced by faithful admonition, or by some- 
thing yet more serious. And not only were we thus assisted 
to an intelligent recognition of ourselves and the world im- 
mediately about us, but knowledge began at once to be 
communicated to us respecting things beyond our reach. 
The appellations of hosts of objects, of places, of beings, 
which we had not seen, and perhaps have not even yet seen, 
we learned by hearing or by reading, and direct instruction 
enabled us to attach to them some characteristic idea, more 
or less complete and adequate. Thus, we had not to cross 
the ocean, and to coast about and traverse a certain island 
beyond it, in order to know that there is a country England, 
and to hold it apart, by specific attributes, from other coun- 
tries of which we obtained like knowledge by like means, 
But enough of this illustration. It is already sufficiently 
clear that the acquisition of language was one of the steps 
of our earliest education. We did not make our own tongue, 
or any part of it; we neither selected the objects, acts, 
mental states, relations, which should be separately desig- 
nated, nor devised their distinctive designations. We simply 
received and appropriated, as well as we could, whatever 
our instructors were pleased to set before us. Independence 
of the general usages of speech was neither encouraged nor 
tolerated in us; nor did we feel tempted toward independ- 
ence Our object was to communicate with those among 


14 HOW WE ACQUIRED [ LECT, 


whom cur lot was cast, to understand them and be under- 
stood by them, to learn what their greater wisdom and 
experience could impart to us. In order to this, we had to 
think and taik as they did, and we were content to do so. 
Why such and such a combination of sounds was applied to 
designate such and such an idea was to us a matter of utter 
indifference ; all we knew or cared to know was that others 
so applied it. Questions of etymology, of fitness of appella- 
tion, concerned us-not. What was it to us, for instance, 
when the answer came back to one of our childish inquiries 
after names, that the word mountain was imported into our 
tongue out of the Latin, through the Norman French, and 
was originally an adjective, meaning ‘hilly, mountainous,’ 
while AilZ had once a g in it, indicating its relationship with 
the adjective high? We recognized no tie between any word 
and the idea represented by it excepting a mental association 
which we had ourselves formed, under the guidance, and in 
obedience to the example, of those about us. We do, indeed, 
when a little older, perhaps, begin to amuse ourselves with 
inquiring into the reasons why this word means that thing, 
and not otherwise: but it is only for the satisfaction of our 
curiosity ; if we fail to find a reason, or if the reason be 
found trivial and insufficient, we do not on that account re- 
ject the word. Thus every vocable was to us an arbitrary 
and conventional sign: arbitrary, because any one of a thou- 
sand other vocables could have been just as easily learned 
by us and associated with the same idea; conventional, 
because the One we acquired had its sole ground and sane- 
tion in the consenting usage of the community of which we 
formed a part. 

Race aud blood, it is equally evident, had nothing to do 
directly with determining our language. English descent 
would never have made us talk English. No matter who 
were our ancestors; if those about us had said wasser and 
milch, or eau and lait, or hiidir and gala, instead of water 
and milk, we should have done the same. We could just as 
readily have accustomed ourselves to say lieben or aimer or 
philein, as love, wahrheit or vérité or alétheia, as truth, And 
so in every other case, An American or English mother, 


t.] OUR MOTHER-TONGUE. 15 


anxious that her child should grow up duly accomplished, 
gives it a French nurse, and takes care that no English be 
spoken in its presence; and not all the blood of all the 
Joneses can save it from talking French first, as if this were 
indeed its own mother-tongue. An infant is taken alive 
from the arms of its drowned mother, the only waif cast 
upon the shore from the wreck of a strange vessel; and if 
learns the tongue of its foster-parents; no outbreak of 
natural and hereditary speech ever betrays from what land 
it derived its birth. The child of a father and mother of 
different race and speech learns the tongue of either, as 
circumstances and their choice may determine; or it learns 
both, and is equally at home in them, hardly knowing 
which to eall its native language. The bands of Africans, 
stolen from their homes and imported into America, lost in 
a generation their Congo or Mendi, and acquired from their 
fellow-slaves a rude jargon in which they could communicate 
with one another and with their masters. The Babel of 
dialects brought every year to our shores by the thousands 
of foreigners who come to seek a new home among us, dis- 
appear in as brief a time, or are kept up only where those 
who speak them herd together in separate communities, 
The Irish peasantry, mingled with and domineered over by 
English colonists, governed under English institutions, feel- 
ing the whole weight, for good and for evil, of a superior 
English civilization, incapacitated from rising above a condi- 
tion of poverty and ignorance without command of English 
speech, unlearn by degrees their native Celtic tongue, and 
adopt the dialect of the ruling and cultivated class. 

No one, I am confident, can fail to allow that this is a 
true account of the process by which we acquire our “ mother- 
tongue.” Every one recognizes, as the grand advantage con- 
nected with the use of language, the fact that in it and by it 
whatever of truth and knowledge each generation has learned 
or worked out can be made over into the possession of the 
generation following. It is not necessary that each of us 
study the world for himself, in order to apprehend and 
classify the varied objects it contains, with their qualities 
and relations, and invent designations for them. This has 


16 PECULIARITIES OF FORM [ LECT. 


been dore by those who came before us, and we enter into 
the fruits of their labours. It is only the first man, before 
whom every beast of the field and every fowl of the air must 
present itself, to see what he will call it; whatever he calls 
any living creature, that is the name thereof, not to himself 
alone, but to his family and descendants, who are content to 
style each as their father had done before them. 

Ovr acquisition of English, however, has as yet been but 
partially and imperfectly described. 

In the first place, the English which we thus learn is of 
that peculiar form or local variety which is talked by our in- 
structors and models. It is, indeed, possible that one may 
have been surrounded from birth by those, and those only, 
whose speech is wholly conformed to perfect standards ; 
then it will have been, at least, his own fault if he has 
learned aught but the purest and most universally accepted 
English. But such cases cannot be otherwise than rare. For, 
setting aside the fact that all are not agreed as to whose 
usage forms the unexceptionable standard, nothing can be 
more certain than that few, on either side of the ocean, know 
and follow it accurately. Not many of us can escape ac- 
quiring in our youth some. tinge of local dialect, of slang 
characteristic of grade or occupation, of personal peculiari- 
ties, even, belonging to our initiators into the mysteries of 
speech. These may be mere inelegancies of pronunciation, 
appearing in individual words or in the general tone of ut- 
terance, like the nasal twang, and the flattening of ow into 
du, Which common fame injuriously ascribes to the Yankee ; 
or they may be ungrammatical modes of expression, or un- 
couth turns and forms of construction ; or favourite recur- 
rent phrases, such as I guess, I calculate, I reckon, I expect, 
you know, each of which has its own region of prevalence; 
or colloquialisms and vulgarisms, which ought to hide their 
heads in good English society ; or words of only dialectic 
currency, which the general language does not recognize. 
Any or all of these or of their like we innocently learn along 
with the rest of our speech, not knowing how to distinguish 
the evil from the good. And often, as some of us know to 
our cost, errors and infelicities are thus so thoroughly 


1.] OF EACH ONE’S ENGLISH. Le 


wrought into our minds, as parts of our habitual modes of 
expression, that not all the care and instruction of after life 
can rid us of them. How many men of culture and 
eminent ability do we meet with, who exhibit through life 
the marks of a defective or vicious early training in their 
native tongue! The dominion of habit is not less powerful 
in language than in anything else that we acquire and prac- 
tise. It is not alone true that he who has once thoroughly 
learned English is thereby almost disqualified from ever 
attaining a native facility, correctness, and elegarice in any_ 
foreign tongue; one may also so thoroughly learn a bad 
style of English as never to be able to ennoble it into tho 
best and most approved form of his native speech. Yet, 
with us, the influences which tend to repress and eradicate 
local peculiarities and individual errors are numerous and 
powerful. One of the most effective among them is school 
instruction. It is made an important part of our education 
to learn to speak and write correctly. The pupil of a faith- 
ful and competent instructor is taught to read and pro- 
nounce, to frame sentences with the mouth and with the 
pen, In a manner accordant with that which is accepted 
among the well-educated everywhere. Social intercourse is 
a cultivating agency hardly less important, and more en- 
during in its action; as long as we live, by associating with 
those who speak correctly, we are shown our own faults, and 
at the same time prompted and taught to correct them. 
Reading—which is but another form of such intercourse— 
consultation of authorities, self-impelled study in various 
forms, help the work. Our speech is improved and per- 
fected, as it was first acquired, by putting ourselves in the 
position of learners, by following the example of those who 
speak better than we do. He who is really in earnest to 
complete his mastery of his mother-tongue may hope for 
final success, whatever have been his early disadvantages ; 
just as one may acquire a foreign tongue, like German or 
French, with a degree of perfection depending only on his 
opportunities, his capacity, his industry, and the length of time 
he devotes to the study. 

Again, even when the process of training which we have 


18 LIMITATIONS OF EXTENT [ LECT. 


described gives general correctness and facility, it is far from 
conferring universal command of the resources of the Eng- 
lish tongue. This is no grand indivisible unity, whereof the 
learner acquires all or none; it is an aggregation of particu- 
lars, and each one appropriates more or less of them, accord- 
ing to his means and ability. The vocabulary which the 
young child has acquired the power to use is a very scanty 
one ; it includes only the most indispensable part of speech, 
names for the commonest objects, the most ordinary and 
familiar conceptions, the simplest relations. You can talk 
with a child only on a certain limited range of subjects; a 
book not written especially for his benefit is in great part 
uniutelligible to him: he has not yet learned its signs for 
thought, and they must be translated imto others with 
which he is acquainted ; or the thought itself is beyond the 
reach of his apprehension, the statement is outside the sphere 
of his knowledge. But in this regard we are all of us more 
or less children. Who ever yet got through learning his 
mother-tongue, and could say, “The work is done?” The 
encyclopedic English language, as we may term it, the Eng- 
lish of the great dictionaries, contains more than a hundred 
thousand words. And these are only a selection out of a 
greater mass. If all the signs for thought employed for 
purposes of communication by those who have spoken and 
who speak no other tongue than ours were brought together, 
if all obsolete, technical, and dialectic words were gathered 
in, which, if they are not English, are of no assignable spoken 
tongue, the number menticned would be vastly augmented. 
Out of this immense mass, it has been reckoned by careful 
observers that from three to five thousand answer all the 
ordinary ends of familiar intercourse, even among the culti- 
vated; and a considerable portion of the English-speaking 
eommunity, including the lowest and most ignorant class, 
never learn to use even so many as three thousand: what 
they do acquire, of course, being, like the child’s vocabulary, 
the most necessary part of the language, signs for the com- 
monest and simplest ideas. To a nucleus of this character, 
every artisan, though otherwise uninstructed, must add the 
technical language of his own craft—names for tools, and 


I.] OF EACH ONE’S ENGLISH. 19 


processes, and products which his every-day experience 
makes familiar to him, but of which the vast majority, per- 
haps, of those outside his own line of life know nothing 
Ignorant as he may be, he will talk to you of a host of mat- 
ters which you shall not understand. No insignificant part 
of the hundred-thousand-word list is made up of selections 
from such technical vocabularies. Each department of labour, 
of art, of science, has its special dialect, fully known only to 
those who have made themselves masters in that department. 
The world requires of every well-informed and* educated 
person a certain amount of knowledge in many special de- 
partments, along with a corresponding portion of the lan- 
guage belonging to each: but he would be indeed a marvel 
of many-sided learning who had mastered them all. Who 
is there among us that will not find, on every page of the 
comprehensive dictionaries now in vogue, words which are 
strange to him, which need defining to his apprehension, 
which he could not be sure of employing in the right place 
and connection? And this, not in the technical portions 
only of our vocabulary. There are words, or meanings of 
words, no longer in familiar use, antiquated or obsolescent, 
which yet may not be denied a place in the present English 
tongue. There are objects which almost never fall under 
the notice of great numbers of pecple, or of whole classes of 
the community, and to whose names, accordingly, when met 
with, these are unable to attach any definite idea. There 
are cognitions, conceptions, feelings, which have not come 
up in the minds of all, which all have not had oceasion and 
acquired power to express. There are distinctions, in every 
department of thought, which all have not learned to draw 
and designate. Moreover, there are various styles of expres- 
sion for the same thing, which are not at every one’s com- 
mand. One writer or speaker has great ease and copious- 
ness of diction; for all his thoughts he has a variety of 
phrases to choose among; he lays them out before us in 
beautiful elaboration, in clear and elegant style, so that to 
follow and understand him is like floating with the current. 
Another, with not less wealth of knowledge and clearness 


of judgment, is cramped and awkward in his use of lapguage; 
: Qe 


20 PECULIARITIES OF MEANING (LECT. 


he puts his ideas before us in a rough and fragmentary way ; 
he carries our understandings with him, but only at the cost 
of labour and pains on our part. And though he may be able 
to comprehend all that is said by the other, he has not in the 
samme sense made the language his own, any more than the 
student of a foreign tongue who can translate from it with 
facility, but can express himself in it only lamely. Thus the 
infinite variety of the native and acquired capacity of different 
individuals comes to light in their idiom. It would be as 
hard to find two persons with precisely the same limits to 
their speech, as with precisely the same lineaments of coun- 
tenrnce. 

Once more, not all who speak the same tongue attach the 
same meaning to the words they utter. We learn what 
words signify either by direct definition or by inference 
from the circumstances in which they are used. But no 
definition is or can be exact and complete; and we are 
always liable to draw wrong inferences. Children, as 
every one knows, are constantly misapprehending the extent 
of meaning and application of the signs they acquire. Un- 
til it learns better, a child calls every man papa; having 
been taught the word sky, it calls the ceiling of a room the 
sky; it calls a donkey or a mule a horse—and naturally 
enough, since it has had to apply the name dog to creatures 
differing far more than these from one another. And so 
long as the learning of language lasts, does the liability to 
such error continue. It is a necessity of the case, arising 
out of the essential nature of language. Words are not 
exact models of ideas; they are merely signs for ideas, at 
whose significance we arrive as well as we can; and no 
mind can put itself into such immediate and intimate com- 
munion with another mind as to think and feel precisely 
with it. Sentences are not images of thoughts, reflected in 
a faultless mirror; nor even photographs, needing only to 
have the colour added: they are but imperfect and frag- 
mentary sketches, giving just outlines enough to enable the 
sense before which they are set up to seize the view intended, 
and to fill it out to a complete picture; while yet, as regarda 
the completeness of the filling out, the details of the work, 


cry IN EACH ONE’S ENGLISH. ~ a} 


and the finer shades of colouring, no two minds will produce 
pictures perfectly accordant with one another, nor will any 
precisely reproduce the original. 

The limits of variation of meaning are, of course, very 
different in different classes of words. So far as these are 
designations of definite objects, cognizable by the senses, 
there is little danger of our seriously misapprehending one 
another when we utter them. Yet, even here, there is 
room for no trifling discordance, as the superior knowledge 
or more vivid imagination of one person gives to the idea 
called up by a name a far richer content than another can 
put into it. Two men speak of the swn, with mutual intel- 
ligence: but to the one he is a mere ball of light and heat, 
which rises in the sky every morning, and goes down again at 
night; to the other, all that science has taught us respecting 
the nature of the great luminary, and its influence upon our 
little planet, is more or less distinctly present every time he 
utters its name. The word Pekin is spoken before a num- 
ber of persons, and is understood by them all: but some 
among them know only that it is the name of an immense 
city in Asia, the capital of the Chinese empire; others have 
studied Chinese manners and customs, have seen pictures of 
Chinese scenery, architecture, dress, occupation, and are able 
to tinge the conception which the word evokes with some 
fair share of a local colouring; another, perhaps, has visited 
the place, and its name touches a store of memories, and 
brings up before his mind’s eye a picture vivid with the 
hues of truth. I feel a tolerable degree of confidence that 
the impressions of colour made on my sense are the same 
with those made upon my friend’s sense, so that, when we 
use the words red or blue, we do not mean different things: 
and yet, even here, it is possible that one of us may be 
afflicted with some degree of colour-blindness, so that we de 
not apprehend the same shades precisely alike. But just so 
is every part of language liable to be affected by the per- 
sonality of the speaker; and most of all, where matters of 
more subjective apprehension are concerned. The volup- 
tuary, the passionate and brutal, the philosophic, and the 
sentimental, for instance, when they speak of love or of hate, 


22 WHAT THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IB, [ LECT. 


mean by no means the same feelings. How pregnant with 
sacred meaning are home, patriotism, faith to some, while 
others utter or hear them with cool indifference! It is need- 
less, however, to multiply examples. Not half the words in our 
familiar speech would be identically defined by any consider- 
able number of those who employ them every day. Nay, 
who knows not that verbal disputes, discussions turning on 
the meaning of words, are the most frequent, bitter, and in- 
terminable of controversies ? 

Clearly, therefore, we are guilty of no paradox in main- 
taining that, while we all speak the English language, the 
English of no two individuals among us is precisely the 
same: it is not the same in form; it 1s not the same in 
extent ; it is not the same in meaning. 

But what, then, is the English language? We answer: 
It is the immense aggregate of the articulated signs for 
thought accepted by, and current among, a certain vast 
community which we call the English-speaking people, em- 
bracing the principal portion of the inhabitants of our own 
country and of Great Britain, with all those who elsewhere 
in the world talk like them. It is the sum of the separate 
languages of all the members of this community. Or—since 
each one says some things, or says them in a way, not to be 
accepted as in the highest sense English—it is their average 
rather than their sum ; it is that part of the aggregate which 
is supported by the usage of the majority ; but of a majority 
made in great part by culture and education, not by num- 
bers alone. It is a mighty region of speech, of somewhat 
fluctuating and uncertain boundaries, whereof each speaker 
occupies a portion, and a certain central tract is included in 
the portion of all: there they meet on common ground ; off it, 
they are strangers to one another. Although one language, it 
includes numerous varieties, of greatly differing kmd and 
degree: individual varieties, class varieties, local varieties. 
Almost any two persons who speak it may talk so as to be 
unintelligible to each other. The one fact which gives it 
unity is, that ail who speak it may, to a considerable extent, 
and on subjects of the most general and pressing interest, 
talk so as to understand one another. 


1.] AND HOW IT IS KEPT IN EXISTENCE. 23 


How this language is kept in existence is clearly shown 
by the foregoing exposition. It is preserved by an un- 
interrupted tradition. Each generation hands it down to 
the generation following. Every one is an actor in the pro- 
cess; in each individual speaker the language has, as we 
may say, a separate and independent existence, as has an 
animal species in each of its members; and each does what 
in him lies to propagate it—that is to say, his own part of 
it, as determined in extent and character by the inherent 
and acquired peculiarities of his nature. And, small as may 
be the share of the work which falls to any one of us, the 
sum of all the shares constitutes the force which effects the 
transmission of the whole language. In the case of a tongue 
like ours, too, these private labours are powerfully aided and 
supplemented by the influence of a literature. Each book 
is, as it were, an undying individual, with whom, often, 
much larger numbers hold intercourse than any living per- 
son can reach, and who teaches them to speak as he speaks. 
A great body of literary works of acknowledged merit and 
authority, in the midst of a people proud and fond of it, is 
an agent in the preservation and transmission of any tongue, 
the importance of which cannot easily be over-estimated: we 
shall have to take it constantly into account in the course of 
our further inquiries into the history of language. But 
each work is, after all, only a single person, with his limita- 
tions and deficiencies, and with his restricted influence. 
Even Shakspeare, with his unrivalled wealth and variety of 
expression, uses but about fifteen thousand words, and Mil- 
ton little more than half so many—mere fragments of the 
encyclopedic English tongue. The language would soon be 
shorn of no small part of its strength, if placed exclusively 
in the hands of any individual, or of any class. Nothing 
less than the combined effort of a whole community, with 
all its classes and orders, in all its variety of characters, cir- 
cumstances, and necessities, is capable of keeping in life a 
whole language. 

But, while our English speech is thus passed onward from 
generation to generation of those who learn to speak it, and, 
hay ng learned themselves, teach others, it does not remain 


24 CHANGES IN [ LECT. 


precisely the same; on the contrary, it is undergoing all the 
time a slow process of modification, which is capable of ren- 
dering it at length another language, unintelligible to those 
who now employ it. In order to be convinced of this, we 
have only to cast an eye backward over its past history, dur- 
ing the period for which we have its progress recorded in 
contemporary documents. How much is there in our pre- 
sent familiar speech which would be strange and meaningless 
to one of Elizabeth’s court! How much, again, do we find 
in any of the writers of that period—in Shakspeare, for in- 
stance—which is no longer good current English! phrases 
and forms of construction which never fall from our lips 
now save as we quote them; scores of words which we have 
lost out of memory, or do not employ in the sense which 
they then bore. Go back yet farther, from half-century to 
half-century, and the case grows rapidly worse; and when 
we arrive at Chaucer and Gower, who are separated from us 
by a paltry interval of five hundred years, only fifteen or 
twenty descents from father to son, we meet with a dialect 
which has a half-foreign look, and can only be read by care- 
ful study, with the aid of a glossary. Another like interval 
of five hundred years brings us to the Anglo-Saxon of King 
Alfred, which is absolutely a strange tongue to us, not less 
unintelligible than the German of the present day, and nearly 
as hard to learn. And yet, we have no reason to believe 
that any one of those thirty or forty generations of Huglish- 
men through whom we are descended from the contem- 
poraries of King Alfred was less simply and single-mindedly 
engaged to transmit to its children the same language which 
it had received from its ancestors than is the generation of 
which we ourselves form a part. It may well be that cir- 
cumstances were less favourable to some of them than to us, 
and that our common speech stands in no danger of suffer- 
ing in the next thousand years a tithe of the change which 
it has suffered in the past thousand. But the forces which 
are at work in it are the same now that they have always 
been, and the effects they are producing are of the same 
essential character: both are inherent in the nature of lan- 


1,] THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 25 


guage, and inseparable from its use. This will be niade 
plain to us by a brief inquiry. 

The most rapid and noticeable mode of change in our 
language is that which is all the time varying the extent and 
meaning of its vocabulary. English speech exists in order 
that we may communicate with one another respecting those 
things which we know. As the stock of words at the com- 
mand of each individual is an approximate measure of the 
sum of his knowledge, so the stock of words composing a 
language corresponds to what is known in the community ; 
the objects it is familiar with, the distinctions it has drawn, 
all its cognitions and reasonings, in the world of matter and 
of mind, must have their appropriate expression. That 
speech should signify more than is in the minds of its speakers 
is obviously impossible ; but neither must it fall short of in- 
dicating what they think. Now the sum of knowledge in 
every community varies not a little from generation to 
generation. Every trade and handicraft, every art, every 
science, 1s constantly chunging its materials, its processes, 
and its products; and its technical dialect is modified accord- 
ingly, while so much of the results of this change as affects 
or interests the general public finds its way into the familiar 
speech of everybody. As our material condition varies, as 
our ways of life, our institutions, private and public, become 
other than they have been, all is necessarily reflected in our 
language. In these days of railroads, steamboats, and tele- 
graphs, of sun-pictures, of chemistry and geology, of improved 
wearing stuffs, furniture, styles of building, articles of food 
aud luxury of every description, how many words and phrases 
are in every one’s mouth which would be utterly unintelligible 
to the most learned man of a century ago, were he te rise 
from his grave and walk our streets! It is, of course, in its 
stores of expression for these more material objects and rela- 
tions, and for the details of technical knowledge, that lan- 
guage changes most notably, because it is with reference to 
tnese that the necessity for change especially arises. The 
central and most indispensable substance of every language 
is made up of designations for things, properties, acts, the 


26 | CHANGES IN [LxEcr, 


apprehension of which is nearly as old as humanity itself, 
which men learned to name as soon as they learned to talk 
at all, and whose names are not liable to pass away or be- 
come superseded. The words red, green, blue, yellow, or 
their equivalents, go back to the earliest period of human 
speech ; it is when some new and delicate shades of colour, 
like the aniline dyes, are invented, that appellations must be 
sought for them, and may be found even among names of 
localities, as Magenta, Solferino, to which the circumstances 
of the time have given a sudden notoriety. Any two rustics, 
from the time of Adam to the present, could talk with one 
another, with all the particularity which their practical ends 
required, of earth and rock, of pebbles and stones, of 
sand and gravel, of loam and clay: but, since the beginning 
of the present century, the mineralogist and geologist have 
elicited a host of new facts touching the history and consti- 
tution of the earth’s crust and the materials of which this 
is made up, have arranged and classified its strata and their 
contents, have brought to light numberless relations, of cause 
and effect, of succession, of origin, date, and value, which 
had hitherto lain hidden in it; and, to express these, they 
have introduced into English speech a whole technical vo- 
eabulary, and one which is still every year extending and 
changing. So it is with botany; so with metaphysics ; so 
with every other branch of science and art. And though 
the greater part of the technical vocabularies remains merely 
technical, understood and employed only by special students 
in each branch, yet the common speech is not entirely un- 
affected by them. Some portion of the results of the 
advancement in knowledge made by the wise and learned 
reaches even the lowest, or all but the very lowest, and is 
expressed in their language; and it thus becomes a part of 
the fundamental stock of ideas which constitute the heritage 
of each generation, which every child is taught to form and 
use. Language, in short, is expanded and contracted in 
precise adaptation to the circumstances and needs of those 
who use it; it is enriched or impoverished, in every part, 
along with the enrichment or impoverishment of their minds. 

This is, as I have said, the most noticeable mode of change 


1] THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 27 


in language, and also the most natural, inevitable, and legiti- 
mate. Even the bigoted purist cannot object to it, or wish 
it otherwise: conservatism here would be the conservatism 
of ignorance, opposing itself to the progress of civilization 
and enlightenment. Along with it, too, comes its natural 
counterpart, the dropping out of use and out of memory of 
words and meanings of words and phrases which circum- 
stances have made it no longer desirable to maintain in 
existence ; which denote the things of a by-gone time, or, by 
the substitution of more acceptable expressions, have become 
unnecessary and otiose. 

But there are also all the time going on in our language 
changes of another and a more questionable character, 
changes which affect the form rather than the content of 
speech, and are in a sense unnecessary, and therefore stoutly 
opposed by the authority of exact tradition ; yet which have 
hitherto shown themselves not less inevitable than the others. 
We have seen that the transmission of language is by tradi- 
tion. But traditional transmission is by its inherent nature 
defective. Ifa story cannot pass a few times from mouth 
to mouth and maintain its integrity, neither can a word pass 
from generation to generation and keep its original form. 
Very young children, as every one knows, so mutilate their 
words and phrases that only those who are most familiar 
with them can understand what they say. But even an 
older child, who has learned to speak in general with toler- 
able correctness, has a special inaptness to utter a particular 
sound, and either drops it altogether or puts another and 
nearly related one in its place. There are certain combina- 
tions of consonants which it cannot manage, and has to 
mouth over into more pronounceable shape. It dropsa 
syllable or two from a long and cumbrous word, It omits 
endings and confounds forms together: me, for instance, has 
to do duty in its usage for me, my, and I; and eat, to stand 
for all persons, tenses, and numbers of the verb. Or, again, 
having learned by prevailing experience that the past sense 
in a verb is signified by the addition of a d, it imagines that, 
because it says I loved, it must also say I bringed ; or else, 
perhaps, remembering I sang from I sing, it says I brang. 


28 CHANGES IN [LECT 


It says foots and mouses; it says gooder and goodest ; it ccn- 
founds sit and set, lie and lay (in which last blunders, unfor- 
tunately, it is supported by the example of too many among | 
the grown-up and educated). Care, on its own part and on 
that of its instructors, corrects by degrees such childish 
errors ; but this care is often wanting or insufficient, and it 
grows up continuing still to speak bad English. Moreover, 
as we have already seen, not each child only, but each man, 
to his dying day, is a learner of his native tongue; nor is 
there any one who is not liable, from carelessness or defective 
instruction, to learn a word or phrase incorrectly, or to re- 
produce it inaccurately. For these reasons there always lies, 
in full vigour and currency, in the lower strata of language- 
users, aS we may term them—among the uneducated or halfs 
educated—a great host of deviations from the best usage, 
offences against the propriety of speech, kept down in the 
main by the controlling influence of good speakers, yet 
all the time threatening to rise to the surface, and now 
and then succeeding in forcing their way up, and com- 
pelling recognition and acceptance from even the best au- 
thorities. 

Of this origin are the class of changes in language which 
we are at present considering. They are, in their inception, 
inaccuracies of speech. They attest the influence of that 
immense numerical majority among the speakers of English 
who do not take sufficient pains to speak correctly, but whose 
blunders become finally the norm of the language. They 
are mainly the results of two tendencies, already illustrated 
in the instances we have given: first, to make things easy 
to our organs of speech, to economize time and effort in the 
work of expression ; second, to get rid of irregular and ex- 
ceptional forms, by extending the prevailing analogies of the 
language. Let us look at a few examples. 

Our written words are thickly sown with silent letters, 
which, as every one knows, are relics of former modes of 
pronunciation, once necessary constituents of spoken lan- 
guage, but gradually dropped, because it was easier to do 
without them. Instances are knight, calm, psalm, would, 
doubt, plough, thought, sword, chestnut. If we will but carry 


1.] THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 29 


our investigations further back, beyond the present written 
form of our words, we sha‘l light upon much more extraor- 
dinary cases of mutilation and abbreviation. Thus, to take 
but a single, though rather striking, example, our alms is the 
scanty relic of the long Greek vocable eleémosuné. All the 
monosyllables, in fact, of which especially the Anglo-Saxon 
portion of our daily speech is in so great measure composed, 
are relics of long polysyllabic forms, usual at an earlier stage 
of the language. Some words are but just through, or even 
now passing through, a like process. In often and soften, 
good usage has taken sides with the corruption which has 
ejected the ¢, and accuses of being old-fashioned or affectedly 
precise the large and respectable class who still pronounce 
that letter; while, on the other hand, it clings to the ¢ of 
captain, ad stigmatizes as vulgar those who presume to say 
cap'n. 

Again, it isthe prevailing English custom to accent a noun 
of two syllables on its first syllable; hosts of nouns of 
French origin have had their native accent altered, in order 
to conform them to this analogy. Such changes have 
been going on at every period in the history of our tongue : 
in Pope, in Milton, in Shakspeare, in Chaucer, you will find 
examples of their action, in ever increasing numbers as you 
go backward from the present time. Nor are they yet over: 
there is ally, which all the authorities agree in pronouncing 
ally, while prevailing popular usage, on both sides of the 
Atlantic, persists in favouring dilly; and it is not unlikely 
that, in the end, the people will prove too strong for the or- 
thoépists, as they have done so many times before. | 

When our Bible translation was made, the verb speak had 
a proper imperfect form, spake: a well-educated Englishman 
would no more have written he spoke than he come and done 
it. But, just as the ill-instructed and the careless now-a- 
days are often guilty of these last two blunders, so then, un- 
doubtedly, large numbers habitually said spoke for spake ; 
until, at last, the struggle against it was given up as hope- 
less ; and no one now says J spake save in conscious imita- 
tion of Biblical style. 

At the same period, but two centuries and a half ago, the 


£0 CHANGES IN [LECT, 


English language contained no such word as its. His had 
been, in the old Anglo-Saxon and ever since, the common 
possessive of he and 7 (A.-S., hit) ; it belonged to the latter 
no less than to the former. But almost all the possessive 
cases in the language were formed by adding s to the nomi- 
native, and his wore the aspect of being so formed from he, 
and of having nothing to do with 7. Why not, then, form 
a new possessive in like manner for 2¢ itself? This was a 
question which very probably suggested itself to a great 
many minds about the same time, and the word its may 
have sprung up in a hundred places at once, and propagated 
itself, under the ban of the purists of the day, who frowned 
upon it, pronounced it “as bad as she’s, for her, would be,” 
apd carefully avoided its use; until at last its popularity 
and evident desirableness caused it to be universally adopt- 
ed and recognized as proper. And, at the present time, few 
of us read our Bibles so curiously as to have discovered 
that they contain no such word as zs, from Genesis to Reve- 
lation. 

The Anglo-Saxon employed ye (ge) as subject of a verb, 
and you (eow) as object, and the early English was careful 
to make the same distinction. Nor is it yet entirely 
lost ; but the use of ye now belongs to a solemn style only, 
and yow has been set up as subject not less than object. 
There was a time when you are for ye are, and yet more 
for thow art, would have been as offensive to the ear of 
a correct English speaker as is now the thee is of the 
Quaker. 

Not a few of the irregular verbs which our language for- 
merly contained have been in later usage assimilated to the 
more numerous class, and conjugated regularly. Take as 
examples help, of which the ancient participle holpen, instead 
of helped, is found still in our Bibles; and work, which has 
gained a modern preterit and participle, worked, although 
the older form, wrought, is also retained in use, with a some- 
what altered and specialized signification. 

Here are changes of various kind and vaiue, though all 
tracing their origin to the same tendencies. Words change 
their shape without losing their identity; old forms, old 


1.] THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 31 


marks of distinction, are neglected and lost: some of these 
could well be spared, but others were valuable, and their 
relinquishment has impaired the power of expression of the 
language ; while new forms are created, and new marks of 
distinction are adopted into general use, and made part and 
parcel of English speech. 

So full and abundant illustration of this department of 
change in language as might be desired cannot be drawn 
from facts with which we are all familiar, because, for some 
time past, the conservative forces have been so powerful in 
our mother-tongue, and the accuracy of historical trans- 
mission so strict, that what is now good English has, in the 
main, long been such, and is likely long to continue such. 
Its alteration goes on so slowly that we hardly perceive it 
in progress, and it is only as we compare the condition of 
the language at a given time with that which it shows at 
the distance of a considerable interval, earlier or later, that 
they come clearly to light. The English is, indeed, among 
all cultivated tongues, the one which has suffered, under the 
influences which we have been describing, the most thorough 
and pervading change of its grammar and vocabulary ; but 
the greater part of this change occurred at a certain definite 
period, and from the effect of circumstances which are well 
known. Our English ancestors, between the time of Alfred 
and that of Chaucer, endured the irruption and conquest of 
a French-speaking people, the Normans—just as did the 
Irish, at a later day, that of the English. That the Saxons 
did not, like the Irish, gradually relinquish their own tongue, 
and learn to talk French altogether, was owing to their ad- 
vanced culture and superior independence of character: 
after a long time of confusion and mutual unintelligibility, 
as every one knows, the Saxons gave up a part of their 
vocabulary for that of the Normans, and the Normans a 
part of theirs, with nearly all their grammar, for those of 
the Saxons, and our present composite dialect, with its mea- 
gre system of grammatical inflections, was the result. The 
example is an extreme one of the transformation which a 
language may be made to undergo in the lapse of a few 


32 CHARACTERISTICS OF [LEcr, 


generations, at the bidding of imperious circumstances; as 
the present stability of the same language is an extreme 
example of what favouring circumstances can do to prevent 
change, and maintain the integrity of speech. 

The facts and conditions which we have been considering 
are of no exceptional character: on the contrary, they are 
common to all the forms of speech current among the sons 
of men. Throughout the world, the same description, in its 
essential features, will be found to hold good. Every 
spoken language is a congeries of individual signs, called 
words ; and each word (with the rare exception of the actual 
additions made by individuals to language, of which we shall 
take account later) was learned by every person who em- 
ploys it from some other person who had employed it before 
him. He adopted it as the sign of a certain idea, because 
*t was already in use by others as such. Inner and essen- 
tial connection between idea and word, whereby the mind 
which conceives the one at once apprehends and produces 
the other, there is none, in any language upon earth. Every 
existing form of human speech is a body of arbitrary and 
conventional signs for thought, handed down by tradition 
from one generation to another, no individual in any genera- 
tion receiving or transmitting the whole body, but the sum 
of the separate givings and takings being effective to keep 
it in existence without essential loss. Yet the process of 
traditional transmission always has been, is now, and will 
ever continue to be, in all parts of the world, an imperfect 
one: no language remains, or can remain, the same durin 
a long period of time. Growth and change make the life of 
language, as they are everywhere.else the inseparable accom- 
paniment and sign of life. A language is living, when it is 
the instrument of thought of a whole people, the wonted 
means of expression of all their feelings, experiences, opin- 
ions, reasonings ; when the connection between it and their 
mental activity is so close that the one reflects the other, 
and that the two grow together, the instrument ever adapt- 
ing itself to the uses which it is to subserve. The ways in 
which this adaptation takes place, and the causes which 


1.] UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE. 33 


accelerate or retard the inevitab.e change of language, have 
been already in part glanced at, and will come up for more 
detailed examination hereafter; it is sufficient at present 
that we fully recognize the fact of change. It is the funda- 
mental fact upon which rests the whole method of linguistie 


study. 


LECTURE II. 


Nature of the force which produces the changes of language; its modes 
of action. Language an institutiun, of historical growth ; its study a 
moral science. Analogies of linguistic science with the phys cal sci- 
ences. Its methods historical. Etymology its foundation. Analysis 
of compound words. Genesis of affixes. Nature of all words as pro- 
duced by actual composition. 


In the preceding lecture, after a very brief survey of the 
history and objects of linguistic science, we entered upon an 
inquiry into the means by which we had become possessed 
of our mother-tongue, an inquiry intended to bring out 
to our view the mode of transmission and preservation of 
language in general. And we saw that it is the work of 
tradition ; that each generation passes along to the genera- 
tion succeeding, with such faithfulness as the nature of the 
case permits, the store of words, phrases, and constructions 
which constitute the substance of a spoken tongue. But 
we also saw that the process of transmission is uniformly an 
imperfect one; that:it never succeeds in keeping any 
language entirely pure and unaltered: on the contrary, lan- 
guage appeared to us as undergoing, everywhere and always, 
a slow process of modification, which in course of time 
effects a considerable change in its constitution, rendering it 
to all intents and purposes a new tongue. This was illus- 
trated from the history of our English speech, which, by 
gradual and accumulated alterations made in it, during the 
past thousand years, by the thirty or forty generations 
through whose mouths it has passed, has grown from the 
Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred, through a succession of inter. . 


ni. WHAT CHANGES LANGUAGE. 35 


mediate phases, into what it is at present. Before, now, we 
go on to examine in detail the processes of linguistic change, 
setting forth more fully their causes and modes of action, 
and exhibiting their results upon a more extended scale, we 
have to draw from what has been already said one or two 
important conclusions, touching the nature of the force by 
which those processes are carried on, and the character, and 
place among the sciences, of the study which undertakes 
their investigation. 

And, in the first place, we see, I think, from our examina- 
tion of the manner in which language is learned and taught, 
in which its life is kept up, what is meant when we speak 
and write of it as having an independent or objective existence, 
as being an organism or possessing an organic structure, 
as having laws of growth, as feeling tendencies, as develop- 
ing, as adapting itself to our needs, and so on, All these 
are figurative expressions, the language of trope and metaphor, 
not of plain fact ; they are wholly unobjectionable when con- 
sciously employed in their proper character, for the sake of 
brevity or liveliness of delineation; they are only harmful 
when we allow them to blind us to the real nature of 
the truths they represent. Language has, in fact, no exist- 
ence save in the minds and mouths of those who use it; it 
is made up of separate articulated signs of thought, each of 
which is attached by a mental association to the idea it 
represents, is uttered by voluntary effort, and has its value 
and currency only by the agreement of speakers and hearers. 
It is in their power, subject to their will; as it is kept up, 
so is it modified and altered, so may it be abandoned, by 
their joint and consenting action, and in no other way what- 
soever. 

This truth is not only often lost from view by those who 
think and reason respecting language, but it is also some- 
times explicitly denied, and the opposite doctrine is set up, 
that language has a life and growth independent of its 
speakers, with which men cannot interfere. A recent 
popular writer * asserts that, “although there is a continu- 

* Professor Max Miller, in his Lectures on the Science of Languege, 


first series, second lecture. 
38 


36 WHAT FORCE PRODUCES [ LECT. 


ous change in language, it is not in the power of man 
either to produce or to prevent it: we might think as well 
of changing the laws which control the circulation of our 
blood, or of adding an inch to our height, as of altering the 
laws of speech, or inventing new words according to our 
own pleasure.” Then, in order to establish the truth of this 
opinion, he goes on to cite a couple of historical instances, 
in which two famous emperors, Tiberius of Rome and Sigis- 
mund of Germany, committed blunders in their Latin, and 
were taken to task and corrected by humble grammarians, 
who informed their imperial. majesties that, however great 
and absolute their power might be, it was not competent to 
make an alteration in the Latin language. The argument 
and conclusion we may take to be of this character: If so 
high and mighty a personage as an emperor could not do so 
small a thing as alter the gender and termination of a single 
word—not even, as Sigismund attempted, in a language 
which was dead, and might therefore be supposed incapable 
of making resistance to the indignity—much less can any 
one of inferior consideration hope to accomplish such a 
change, or any other of the changes, of greater or less 
account, which make up the history of speech: therefore, 
language is incapable of alteration by its speakers. 

The utter futility of deriving such a doctrine from such a 
pair of incidents, or from a score, a hundred, or a thousand 
like them, is almost too obvious to be worth the trouble of 
pointing out. Against what authority more mighty than 
their own did these two emperors offend ? Simply against 
the immemorial and well-defined usage of all who wrote 
and had ever written Latin—nothing more and nothing 
less. High political station does not confer the right 
to make and unmake language; a sovereign’s grammatical 
blunders do not become the law of speech to his subjects, 
any more than do those of the private man. Each indi- 
vidual is, in a way, constantly trying experiments of modifi- 
cation upon his mother-tongue, from the time when, as 
a child, he drops sounds and syllables which it does not suit 
his convenience to pronounce, and frames inflections upon 
mistaken analogies, to that when, as a man, he is guilty of 


11. | THE CHANGES OF LANGUAGE. 37 


3zlang, vulgarisms, and bad grammar, or indulges in manner- 
isms and artificial conceits, or twists words out of their true 
uses, from ignorance or caprice. But his individual influ- 
ence is too weak to make head against the consenting usage 
of the community ; his proposals, unless for special reasons, 
are passed over unnoticed, and he is forced to conform his 
speech to that of the rest; or, if he insist upon his in- 
dependence, he is contemned as a blunderer, or laughed at 
as a humourist. 

That an alteration should have been made at the time of 
Sigismund in any item of Latin grammar, either by the em- 
peror himself, or by all the potentates and learned men 
of Christendom, was an impossibility. For the language 
was a dead one; its proprieties of speech were no longer 
dependent upon the sanction of present usage, but upon 
the authority of unchanging models. Much that we say is 
good English, though Shakspeare and Milton knew it not; 
nothing can be good Latin, unless it be found in Cicero and 
Virgil, or their compeers. And even under Tiberius, the 
case was nearly the same: the great authors whose example 
makes the law of Latin speech had already lived and written; 
and any deviation from, their usage would have been recog- 
nized by all coming time as a later corruption. Hence, 
even had that emperor’s blunder been accepted and slavishly 
imitated by his courtiers, his army, and his subjects at 
large, their consent could have made it good second-rate 
Latin only ; it might have become the very best usage ‘in 
the later Italian, French, and Spanish, but it would always 
have been rejected and avoided by the strict classicists. 
And all this, not for the reason that man has no power over 
language, but precisely for the contrary reason, that he has 
all power over it—that men’s usage makes language. He, 
accordingly, who can direct usage can make or alter language. 
In this way only can exalted rank confer authority over 
speech: it can give a more powerful impulse toward that 
general acceptance and currency which anything must win 
in order to be language. There are instances on record in 
which the pun of a monarch has changed for all time the. 
form of a word. Hthnologists well know that the name of © 


38 HOW ADDITIONS T9 [ LECT. 


the so-called “ Tartar“ race is properly Tatar, and they are 
now endeavouring to restore this, its correct orthography. 
The intrusion of the 7 is accounted for in the following man- 
ner. When, in the reign of St Louis of France, the 
hordes of this savage race were devastating eastern Europe, 
the tale of their ravages was brought to the pious king, who 
exclaimed with horror: “ Well may they be called Zartars, 
for their deeds are those of fiends from Tartarus.” The 
appositeness of the metamorphosed appellation made it take, 
and from that time French authors—and, after their ex- 
ample, the rest of Europe—have called the Tatars “ Tartars.” 
Whether the story is incontestably authentic or not is 
of small consequence : any one can see that it might be true, 
and that such causes may have produced such effects times 
innumerable. 

The speakers of language thus constitute a republic, or 
rather, a democracy, in which authority is conferred only 
by general suffrage and for due cause, and is exercised 
under constant supervision and control. Individuals are 
abundantly permitted to make additions to the common 
speech, if there be reason for it, and if, in their work, they 
respect the sense of the community. When the first 
schooner ever built, on the coast of Massachusetts, slid 
from her stocks and floated gracefully upon the water, the 
chance exclamation of an admiring by-stander, “Oh, how 
she scoons !” drew from her contriver and builder the an- 
swer, “A scooner let her be, then,” and made a new English 
word. The community ratified his act, and accepted the 
word he proposed, because the new thing wanted a new 
name, and there was no one else so well entitled as he to 
name it ; if, on the other hand, he had assumed to christen 
a man-of-war a scooner, no one but nis nearest neighbours 
would ever have heard of the attempt. The discoverer of a 
new asteroid, again, is allowed to select its title, provided 
he choose the name of some classical goddess, as is the 
established precedent for such cases—although, even then, 
he is liable to have the motives of his choice somewhat 
sharply looked into. The English astronomer who sought, 
a few years since, with covert loyalty, to call his planetling 


11. ] LANGUAGF ARE MADE. 39 


“ Victoria,” was compelled to retract the appellation and 
offer another. An acute and learned Italian physician, 
some time in the last century, discovered a new physical 
force, and some one called it galvanism, after his name. 
Many of us well remember how, not long ago, a French 
savant devised a novel and universally interesting application 
of certain chemical processes ; and here, again, by some per- 
son to whose act the community gave its assent, the product 
was named for its inventor a daguerreotype : and galvanism and 
daguerreotype, with their derivatives, are now as genuine and 
well established parts of the English language as are sun 
and moon, or father and mother. If Galvani had denominated 
his new principle abracadabra, or if Daguerre had styled his 
sun-pictures aldiborontiphoscophornios, these names would, 
indeed, have been not less inherently suitable than the ones 
actually chosen, in the view of the great majority of those 
who have since learned to use the latter; for compara- 
tively few have ever heard of the two eminent discoverers, 
or learned enough of Greek to be able to perceive the ety- 
mological aptness of type ; yet those who are accustomed to 
direct public opinion upon such subjects would have revolted, 
and insisted upon the substitution of other titles, which 
should seem to them to possess an obvious reason and ap- 
plicability. The public has looked on quietly, during the 
last half-century, while the geologists have been bringing 
into our English speech their flood of new words, nouns, 
adjectives, and verbs, of various origin and not seldom of 
uncouth and barbarous aspect, wherewith to signify the new 
knowledge added by them to the common stock that we all 
draw from: these gentlemen know best; if they agree 
among themselves that necessity and propriety require us to 
say Silurian, paleontological, odlite, post-pleiocene, and the 
like, we are ready to do so, whether our acquaintance with 
ancient and modern geography and with the classical tongues 
be or be not sufficient to enable us to discover or appreciate 
the reason of each term. 

But even in respect to the more intimate and sacred part of 
language, the words and phrases of universal and every-day 
use, the community confers some measure of authority upon 


40 HOW ADDITIONS To [ LECT, 


those who have a just title to it, upon great masters in the 
art of speech, upon speakers whose eloquence carries cap- 
tive all hearts, upon writers whose power in wielding the 
common instrument of thought is felt and acknowledged 
through all ranks. Such a one may now and then coin @ 
new word, if he follow established analogies; he may revive 
and bring again into currency one which had fallen into 
desuetude; he may confer on an old word a new value, 
not too far differing from that already belonging to it—and 
the license shall be ratified by general acceptance. A great 
author may, by his single authority, turn the trembling scale 
in favour of the admission to good usage of some popular 
word or phrase, born of an original corruption or blunder, 
which had hitherto been frowned upon and banned; nay, 
even his mannerisms and conceits may perhaps become the 
law of the language. The maxim usus norma loquendt, 
‘usage is the rule of speech,’ is of supreme and uncontrolled 
validity in every part and parcel of every human tongue, 
and each individual can make his fellows talk and write as 
he does just in proportion to the influence which they are 
disposed to concede to him. 

In a language circumstanced like ours, a conscious and 
detailed discussion sometimes arises on the question of ad- 
mitting some new word into its recognized vocabulary. We 
all remember the newspaper controversy, not long ago, as to 
whether we ought to call a message sent by telegraph a 
telegraph or a telegram; and many of us, doubtless, are yet 
waiting to see how the authorities settle it, that we may 
govern our own usage accordingly. We have a suffix able, 
which, like a few others that we possess, we use pretty freely 
in forming new words. Within no very long time past, some 
writers and speakers have added it to the verb rely, forming 
the adjective reliable. The same thing must have been done 
at nearly the same time to other verbs, awakening neither 
question nor objection ; while, nevertheless, reliable is still 
shut out from the best—or, at least, from the most exclusive 
—society in English speech. And why? Because, in the 
first place, say the objectors, the word is unnecessary ; wé 
haye already trustworthy, which means the same thing: fure 


11. ] LANGUAGE ARE MADE. 41 


ther, it is improperly and falsely formed; as we say “ to 
rely on” anything, our derivative adjective, if we make one, 
should be relionable, not reliable : finally, it is low-caste ; A, 
B, and C, those prime authorities in Huglish style, are care- 
ful never to let it slip from their pens. The other side, 
however, are obstinate, and do not yield the point. The 
first objection, they retort, is insufficient ; no one can pro- 
perly oppose the enrichment of the language by a synonym, 
which may yet be made to distinguish a valuable shade of 
meaning—which, indeed, already shows signs of doing so, as 
we tend to say “a trustworthy witness,” but “ reliable testi- 
mony.” The second is false: English etymology is by no 
means so precise in its application of the suffix able as the 
objectors claim ; it admits laughable, meaning ‘ worthy to be 
laughed at,’ wnaccountable, ‘not to be accounted for,’ indis- 
pensable, ‘not to be dispensed with, as well as many other 
words of the same kind; and even objectionable, ‘liable to 
objection,’ marriageable, ‘fit for marriage,’ and so forth. As 
for the third objection, whatever A, B, and C may do, it is 
certain that D, F, and H, with most of the lower part of the 
alphabet (including nearly all the X’s, Y’s, and Z’s, the un- 
known quantities), use the new form freely ; and it is vain 
to stand out against the full acceptance of a word which is 
supported by so much and so respectable authority. How 
the dispute is likely, or ought, to terminate, need not concern 
us here; it is only referred to because, while itself carried 
on in full consciousness, and on paper, it is a typical illus- 
tration of a whole class of discussions which go on silently, 
and even more or less unconsciously, in the minds before 
which is presented, for acceptance or rejection, any proposed 
alteration in the subsisting usages of speech. Is it called 
for ? is it accordant with the analogies of the language? is 
it offered or backed by good authority ? these are the con- 
siderations by which general consent is won or repelled; and 
general consent decides every case without appeal. 
Dewnright additions, however, to the vocabulary of a 
spoken tongue, even those who hold to the doctrine of the 
orgenic life of language will probably be willing to ascribe 
to ] uman agency ; since no man in his sober senses, it would 


42 HOW PHONETIC CHANGES IN [LEcT. 


seem, could possibly maintain that, when some individual 
mind has formed a conception or drawn a deduction, or when 
some individual ingenuity has brought forth a product of any 
of the modes of activity of which man is capable, language 
itself spontaneously extrudes a word for its designation! 
-He who sees is likewise he who says; the ingenuity that 
could find the thing was never at a loss to devise also its 
appellation. 

But the case is not otherwise with those gradual changes 
which bring about the decay of grammatical structure, or 
the metamorphosis of phonetic form, in a language. Though 
they go onin a more covert and unacknowledged way than 
the augmentations of a vocabulary, they are due to the 
action of the same forces. If we write knight, and pronounce 
it nit, while our ancestors spelled the word eniht, and made 
its every letter distinctly audible (giving the ¢ our short 7- 
sound, as in pin)—just as the Germans even now both write 
and speak the same word knecht—we know that it is not 
because, by any force inherent in the word itself, the fuller 
form grew into the simpler, but because the combination ka, 
as initial, was somewhat difficult for men’s organs to utter, 
and therefore began to lose its &, first, in the mouths of 
careless and easy speakers; and the corruption went on 
gaining in popularity, until it became the rule of our speech 
to silence the mute before the nasal in all such words (as in 
knife, knit, gnat, gnaw, etc.) ; because, moreover, the sound 
of the guttural h after a vowel became unpopular, men’s 
organs shrinking from the effort of producing it, and was 
finally got rid of everywhere (being either left out entirely, 
as in nigh, ought, or turned into f, asin laugh, cough) ; while, 
at the same time, the loss of this consonant led to a pro- 
longation of the vowel z, which was changed into the diph- 
thongal sound we now give it; in company, too, with so 
many other of the “long 7’s” of the older language, that our 
usual name at present for the diphthorg is “long 7.” And 
so in all the multitude of similar cases. There is no neces- 
sity, physiological or other, for the rustic’s saying kdw for 
cow; only the former is a lazy drawling utterance, which 
opens the mouth less widely than the latter. A precisely 


II. ] LANGUAGE ARE MADE, 43 


Bimilar flattening of the simple sound of a, in such words as 
grasp, grift, dince—which but a brief time since were uni- 
versally pronounced grasp, grdft, dance (a as in far), and are 
so still in certain localities—is now so common as to have 
become the accepted mode of utterance ; but no one fails to 
recognize in it a corruption of the previous pronunciation, 
made current by example and imitation, prompted and re. 
commended by that lazy habit of mouth which hag occasion- 
ed the dimming of so many of our clear yowels. The pro- 
nunciation either and neither seems at the present time to be 
spreading in our community, and threatening to crowd out 
of use the better-supported and more analogical * éither and 
néither ; but it is only by the deliberate choice of persons 
who fancy that there is something nicer, more recherché, 
more “ English,” in the new sound, and by imitation of 
these on the part of others. Such phonetic changes, we are 
accustomed to say, are inevitable, and creep in of them- 
selves ; but that is only another way of saying that we know 
not who in particular is to blame for them. Offences must 
needs come, but there is always that man by whom they 
come, could we but trace him out. 

lt is unnecessary to dwell longer upon this point, or to 
illustrate it more fully, inasmuch as even those who teach 
the independent existence and organic growth of language 
yet allow that phonetic change is the work of men, endea- 
vouring to make things easy to their organs of speech. 

A language in the condition in which ours is at present, 
when thousands of eyes are jealously watching its integrity, 
and a thousand pens are ready to be drawn, and dyed deep 
in ink, to challenge and oppose the introduction into it of 
any corrupt form, of any new and uncalled-for element, can, 
of course, undergo only the slowest and the least essential 
alteration. It is when the common speech is in the sole 
keeping of the uncultivated and careless speakers, who care 
little for classical and time-honoured usages, to whom the 
preferences of the moment are of more account than any- 

* The only English word in which e has the “long 7” sound is height, 


and even there it is nothing but an old orthographical blunder; there was 
no reason for divorcing the derivative noun in spelling from its theme, high 


44, ACTION ON LANGUAGE OF INDIVIDUALS, [ LECT. 


thing in the past or in the future, that mutation has its full 
course. New dialects are wont to grow up among the com- 
mon people, while the speech of the educated and lettered 
class continues to be what it has been. But the nature of 
the forces in action is the same in the one case as in the 
other: all change in language is the work of the will of its 
speakers, which acts under the government of motives, 
through the organs of speech, and varies their products 
to suit its necessities and its convenience. Every single 
item of alteration, of whatever kind, and of whatever degree 
of importance, goes back to some individual or individuals, 
who set it in circulation, from whose example it gained a 
wider and wider currency, until it finally won that general 
assent which is alone required in order to make anything in 
language proper and authoritative. Linguistic change must 
be gradual, and almost insensible while in progress, for the 
reason that the general assent can be but slowly gained, and 
can be gained for nothing which is too far removed from 
former usage, and which therefore seems far-fetched, arbi- 
trary, or unintelligible. The collective influence of all the 
established analogies of a language is exerted against any 
daring innovation, as, on the other hand, it aids one which 
is obvious and naturally suggested. It was, for instance, 
no difficult matter for popular usage to introduce the new 
possessive ifs into English speech, nor to add worked to 
wrought, as preterit of work, nor to replace the ancient 
plural kye or kine (Anglo-Saxon cy, from ew, ‘cow’) by a 
modern one, cows, formed after the ordinary model: while 
to reverse either process, to crowd its, worked, and cows out 
of use by substitution of his, wrought, and kine, would have 
been found utterly impracticable. The power of resistance 
to change possessed by a great popular institution, which is 
bound up with the interests of the whole community, and is 
a part of every man’s thoughts and habitual acts, is not 
easily to be overestimated. How long has it taken to per- 
suade and force the French people, for instance, into the 
adoption of the new decimal system of weights and mea- 
sures! How have they been bafiled and shamed who have 
thought, in these latter days, to amend in a few points, of 


II.] AND OF THE CUMMUNITY. 45 


obvious desirability, our English orthography! But speech 
is a thing of far nearer and higher importance ; it is the 
most precious of our possessions, the instrument of our 
thoughts, the organ of our social nature, the means of our 
culture ; its use is not daily or hourly alone, but momently ; 
it is the first thing we learn, the last we forget; it is the 
most intimate and clinging of our habits, and almost a 
second nature: and hence its exemption from all sweeping 
or arbitrary change. The community, to whom it belongs, 
will suffer no finger to be laid upon it without a reason; 
only such modifications as commend themselves to the 
general sense, as are virtually the carrying out of tendencies 
universally felt, have a chance of winning approval and 
acceptance, and so of being adopted into use, and made 
language. 

Thus it is indeed true that the individual has no power 
to change language. But it is not true in any sense which 
excludes his agency, but only so far as that agency is con- 
fessed to be inoperative except as it is ratified by those 
about him. Speech and the changes of speech are the work 
of the community; but the community cannot act except 
through the initiative of its individual members, which it 
follows or rejects. The work of each individual is done un- 
premeditatedly, or as it were unconsciously; each is intent 
only on using the common possession for his own benefit, 
serving therewith his private ends; but each is thus at the 
same time an actor in the great work of perpetuating and of 
shaping the general speech. So each separate polyp on 
a coral-bank devotes himself simply to the securing of his 
own food, and excretes calcareous matter only in obedience 
to the exigencies of his individual life; but, as the joint re- 
sult of the isolated labours of all, there slowly rises in the 
water the enormous coral cliff, a barrier for the waves to 
dash themselves against in vain. To pick out a single man, 
were he even an emperor, and hold him up to view in his 
impotence as proof that men cannot make or alter language, 
is precisely equivalent to selecting one polyp, though the 
biggest and brightest-coloured of his species, off the grow- 
ing reef, and exclaiming over him, “ See this weak and puny 


46 ANALOGIES BETWEEN LINGUISTIC SCIENCE  [LECT. 


creature! how is it possible that he and his like should 
build up a reef or an island?” No one ever set himself 
deliberately at work to invent or improve language—or did 
so, at least, with any valuable and abiding result; the work 
is all accomplished by a continual satisfaction of the need of 
the moment, by ever yielding to an impulse and grasping 
a possibility which the already acquired treasure of words 
and forms, and the habit of their use, suggest and put 
within reach. In this sense is language a growth; it is not 
consciously fabricated ; it increases by a constant and im- 
plicit adaptation to the expanding necessities and capacities 
of men. 

This, again, is what is meant by the phrases “ organic 
growth, organic development,” as applied to language. A 
language, like an organic body, is no mere aggregate of 
similar particles; it is a complex of related and mutually 
helpful parts. As such a body increases by the accretion of 
matter having a structure homogeneous with its own, as its 
already existing organs form the new addition, and form it 
for a determinate purpose—to aid the general life, to help 
the performance of the natural functions, of the organized 
being—-so is it also with language: its new stores are form- 
ed from, or assimilated to, its previous substance ; it enriches 
itself with the evolutions of its own internal processes, and 
in order more fully to secure the end of its being, the ex- 
pression of the thought of those to whom it belongs. Its 
rise, development, decline, and extinction are like the birth, 
increase, decay, and death of a living creature. 

There is a yet closer parallelism between the life of lan- 
guage and that of the animal kingdom in general. The 
speech of each person is, as it were, an individual of a species, 
with its general inherited conformity to the specific type, but 
also with its individual peculiarities, its tendency to variation 
and the formation of anew species. The dialects, languages, 
groups, families, stocks, set up by the linguistic student, 
correspond with the varieties, species, genera, and so on, of 
the zodlogist. And the questions which the students of 
nature are so excitedly discussing at the present day—the 
nature of specific distinctions, the derivation of species by 


11.] AND THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES. 47 


individual variation and natural selection, the unity of origin 
of animal life—all are closely akin with those whieh the 
linguistic student has constant occasion to treat. We need 
not here dwell further upon the comparison: it is so natur- 
ally suggested, and so fruitful of interesting and instructive 
analogies, that it has been repeatedly drawn out and 
employed, by students both of nature and of language.* 

Once more, a noteworthy and often-remarked similarity 
exists between the facts and methods of geology and those 
of linguistic study. The science of language is, as it were, 
the geology of the most modern period, the Age of Man, 
having for its task to construct the history of development 
of the earth and its inhabitants from the time when the 
proper geological record remains silent ; when man, no longer 
a mere animal, begins by the aid of language to bear witness 
respecting his own progress and that of the world about him. 
The remains of ancient speech are like strata deposited in 
bygone ages, telling of the forms of life then existing, and of 
the circumstances which determined or affected them; while 
words are as rolled pebbles, relics of yet more ancient form- 
ations, or as fossils, whose grade indicates the progress of 
organic life, and whose resemblances and relations show the 
correspondence or sequence of the different strata; while, 
everywhere, extensive denudation hasmarred the completeness 
of the record, and rendered impossible a detailed exhibition 
of the whole course of development. 

Other anaiogies, hardly less striking than these, might 
doubtless be found by a mind curious of such things. Yet 
they would be, like these, analogies merely, instructive as 
illustrations, but becoming fruitful of error when, letting our 
fancy run away with our reason, we allow them to determine 
our fundamental views respecting the nature of language 
and the method of its study ; when we call language a living 


* For instance, by Lyell (Antiquity of Man, chapter xxiii.), who has founded 
upon it a lucid and able analogical argument bearing on the Darwinian 
theory of the mutation of species. Professor August Schleicher (Die Darwin- 
sche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft, Weimar, 1863) attempts absolutely 
to prove by its aid the truth of the Darwinian theory, overlooking the facé 
that the relation between the two classes of phenomena is one of analogy 
only, not of essential agreement. 


43 THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE [LEctT. 


and growing organism, or pronounce linguistics a physical 
science, because zodlogy and geology are such. The point 
is one of essential consequence in linguistic philosophy. We 
shall never gain a clear apprehension of the phenomena of 
linguistic history, either in their individuality or in their to- 
tality, if we mistake the nature of the forces which are activo 
in producing them. Language is, in fact, an institution— 
the word may seem an awkward one, but we can find none 
better or more truly descriptive—the work of those whose 
wants it subserves ; it is in their sole keeping and control; 
it has been by them adapted to their circumstances and wants, 
and is still everywhere undergoing at their hands such adapta- 
tion ; every separate item of which it is composed is, in its pre- 
sent form—for we are not yet ready fora discussion of the 
ultimate origin of human speech—the product of a series of 
changes, effected by the will and consent of men, working 
themselves out under historical conditions, and conditions of 
man’s nature, and by the impulse of motives, which are, in 
the main, distinctiy trvaceable, and form a legitimate subject 
of scientific investigation. 

These considerations determine the character of the study 
of language as a historical or moral science. It is a branch 
of the history of the human race and of human institutions. 
It calls for aid upon various other sciences, both moral and 
physical: upon mental and metaphysical philosophy, for an 
account of the associations which underlie the developments 
of signification, and of the laws of thought, the universal 
principles of relation, which fix the outlines of grammar ; 
upon physiology, for explanation of the structure and mode 
of operation of the organs of speech, and the physical rela- 
tions of articulate sounds, which determine the laws of 
euphony, and prescribe the methods of phonetic change; 
upon physical geography and meteorology, even, for informa- 
tion respecting material conditions and climatic aspects, 
which have exerted their influence upon linguistic growth. 
But the human mind, seeking and choosing expression for 
human thought, stands as middle term between all determin- 
ing causes and their results in the development of language. 
It is only as they affect man himself,in his desires and tenu- 


tI] Is A HISTORICAL SCIENCE. 49 


encies or in his capacities, that they can affect speech: the 
immediate agent is the will of men, working under the joint 
direction of impelling wants, governing circumstances, and 
established habits. What makes a physical science is that 
it deals with material substances, acted on by material forces. 
In the formation of geological strata, the ultimate cognizable 
agencies are the laws of matter; the substance affected js 
tangible matter ; the product is inert, insensible matter. Tn 
z00logy, again, as in anatomy and physiology, the investigator 
has to do with material structures, whose formation is de- 
pendent on laws implanted in matter itself, and beyond the 
reach of voluntary action. In language, on the other hand, 
the ultimate agencies are intelligent beings, the material is— 
not articulated sound alone, which might, in a certain sense, 
be regarded as a physical product, but—sound made signifi- 
cant of thought; and the product is of the same kind, a sys- 
tem of sounds with intelligible content, expressive of the 
slowly accumulated wealth of the human race in wisdom, 
experience, comprehension of itself and of the rest of cre. 
ation. What but an analogical resemblance can there 
possibly be between the studies of things so essentially dis- 
similar P 
There is a school of modern philosophers who are trying 
to materialize all science, to eliminate the distinction between 
he physical and the intellectual and moral, to declare for 
naught the free action of the human will, and to resolve the 
whole story of the fates of mankind into a series of purely 
material effects, produced by assignable physical causes, and 
explainable in the past, or determinable for the future, by 
an intimate knowledge of those causes, by a recognition of 
the action of compulsory motives upon the passively obedient 
nature of man, With such, language will naturally pass, 
along with the rest, for a physical product, and its study for 
a physical science ; and, however we may dissent from their 
general classification, we cannot quarrel with its application 
in this particular instance. But by those who still hold to 
the grand distinction of moral and physical sciences, who 
think the action of intelligent beings, weighing motives and 
selecting courses of conduct, seeing ends and seeking means 
4 


50 ABSENCE OF REFLECTION AND INTENTION  [LKCT. 


to their attainment, to be fundamentally and essentially 
different from that of atoms moved by gravity, chemical 
affinity, and the other immutable forces of nature, as we call 
them—by such, the study of language, whose dependence 
upon voluntary action is so absolute that not one word ever 
was or ever will be uttered without the distinct exertion of 
the human will, cannot but be regarded as a moral science ; 
its real relationship is with those branches of human know- 
ledge among which common opinion is accustomed to rank 
it—with mental philosophy, with philology, with history. 
While, however, we are thus forced to the acknowledgment 
that everything in human speech is a product of the con- 
scious action of human beings, we should be leaving out of 
sight a matter of essential consequence in linguistic investi- _ 
gation if we failed to notice that what the linguistic student 
seeks in language is not what men have veluntarily or inten- 
tionally placed there. As we have already seen, each separ- 
ate item in the production or modification of language is a 
satisfaction of the need of the moment; it is prompted 
by the exigencies of the particular case; it is brought forth 
for the practical end of convenient communication, and with 
no ulterior aim or object whatsoever; it is accepted by the 
community only because it supplies a perceived want, and 
answers an acknowledged purpose in the uses of social 
intercourse. The language-makers are quite heedless of its 
position and value as part of a system, or as a record with 
historical content, nor do they analyze and set before their 
consciousness the mental tendencies which it gratifies. A 
language is, in very truth, a grand system, of a highly com- 
plicated and symmetrical structure ; it is fitly comparable 
with an organized body; but this is not because any human 
mind has planned such a structure and skilfully worked it 
out. Each single part is conscious and intentional; the 
whole is instinctive and natural. The unity and symmetry 
of the system is the unconscious product of the efforts of the 
human mind, grappling with the facts of the world without 
and the world within itself, and recording each separate 
result in speech. Herein is a real language fundamentally 
different from the elaborate and philosophical structures 


11. ] IX THE FACTS OF LANGUAGE. 51 


with which ingenious men have sometimes thought to replace 
them.* These are indeed artful devices, in which the cha- 
racter and bearing of each part is painfully weighed and 
determined in advance: compared with them, language is a 
real growth; and human thought will as readily exchange 
its natural covering for one of them as the growing crusta- 
cean will give up its shell for a casing of silver, wrought by 
the most skilful hands. Their symmetry is that of a mathe- 
matical figure, carefully laid out, and drawn to rule and line; 
in language, the human mind, tethered by its limited capaci- 
ties in the midst of creation, reaches out as far as it can in 
every direction and makes its mark, and is surprised at 
the end to find the result a circle. 

In whatever aspect the general facts of language are 
viewed, they exhibit the same absence of reflection and 
intention. Phonetic change is the spontaneous working 
out of tendencies which the individual does not acknowledge 
to himself, in their effects upon organs of whose structure 
and workings he is almost or wholly ignorant. Outward 
circumstances, historical conditions, progress of knowledge 
and culture, are recorded in speech because its practical 
uses require that they should be so, not because any one has 
attempted to depict them. Language shows ethnic descent, 
not as men have chosen to preserve such evidence of their 
kindred with other communities and races, but as it cannot 
be effaced without special effort directed to that end. The 
operations of the mind, the development of association, the 
laws of subjective relation, are exhibited there, but only 
as they are the agencies which govern the phenomena of 
speech, unrecognized in their working, but inferrible from 
their effects. 

Now it is this absence of reflection and conscious intent 
which takes away from the facts of language the subjective 
character that would otherwise belong to them as products 
of voluntary action. The linguistic student feels that he is 
not dealing with the artful creations of individuals. So far 


* For an account of some of these attempts at an artificial language, 
of theoretically perfect structure, and designed for universal use, see Professor 
Max Miiller’s Lectures on Language, second series, second lecture, 

+= 


52 WHY LINGUISTIC SCIENCE HAS BEEN [ LECT. 


as concerns the purposes for which he examines them, and 
the results he would derive from them, they are almost 
as little the work of man as is the form of his skull, the out- 
lines of his face, the construction of his arm and hand. 
They are fairly to be regarded as reflections of the facts of 
human nature and human history, in a mirror imperfect, in- 
deed, but faithful and wholly trustworthy ; not as pictures 
drawn by men’s hands for our information. Hence the 
close analogies which may be drawn between the study of lan- 
guage and some of the physical sciences. Hence, above all, 
the fundamental and pervading correspondence between its 
whole method and theirs. Not less than they, it founds 
itself upon the widest observation and examination of par- 
ticular facts, and proceeds toward its results by strict induc- 
tion, comparing, arranging, and classifying, tracing out rela- 
tions, exhibiting an inherent system, deducing laws of 
general or universal application, discovering beneath all 
the variety and diversity of particulars an ever-present 
unity, in origin and development, in plan and purpose. 
Beyond all question, it is this coincidence of method which 
has confused some of -the votaries of linguistic science, and 
blinded their eyes to the true nature of the ultimate facts 
upon which their study.is founded, leading them to deny the 
agency of man in the production and change of language, 
and to pronounce it an organic growth, governed by organic 
forces. 

Another motive—a less important one, and in great part, 
doubtless, unconscious in its action— impelling certain 
students of language to claim for their favourite branch of 
investigation a place in the sisterhood of physical sciences, 
has been, as I cannot but think, an apprehension lest other- 
wise they should be unable to prove it entitled to the rank 
of a science at all. There is a growing disposition on the 
part of the devotees of physical studies—a class greatly and 
rapidly increasing in importance and influence—to restrict 
the honourable title of science to those departments of 
knowledge which are founded on the unvarying laws of 
material nature, and to deny the possibility of scientific 
ynethod and scientific results where the main element of 


11. ] REGARDED AS A PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 5d 


action is the varying and capricious will of man. The con- 
siderations adduced above, it is hoped, will remove this 
apprehension. Nor was it ever otherwise than needless, as 
the tendency which called it forth is mistaken and un- 
justifiable. The name “science” admits no such limitation. 
The vastness of a field of study, the unity in variety of 
the facts it includes, their connection by such ties that they 
allow of strict classification and offer fruitful ground for de- 
duction, and the value of the results attained, the truth 
deduced—these things make a science. And, in all these 
respects, the study of language need fear a comparison with 
no one of the physical sciences. Its field is the speech of 
all mankind, cultivated or savage; the thousands of existing 
dialects, with all their recorded predecessors; the countless 
multitudes of details furnished by these, each significant of a 
fact in human history, external or internal. The wealth of 
languages is like the wealth of species in the whole animal 
kingdom. Their tie of connection is the unity of human 
nature in its wants and capacities, the unity of human know- 
ledge, of existing things and their relations, to be appre- 
hended by the mind and reflected in speech—a bond as 
infinite in its ramifications among all the varieties of human 
language, and as powerful in its binding force, as is the 
unity of plan in vegetable or animal life. The results, 
finally, for human history, the history of mind, of civiliza- 
tion, of connection of races, for the comprehension of man, 
in his high endowments and in his use of them, are of 
surpassing interest. To compare their worth with that of 
the results derivable from other sciences were to no good 
purpose: all truth is valuable, and that which pertains 
to the nature and history of man himself is, to say the least, 
not inferior in interest to that which concerns his surround- 
ings. Linguistic science, then, has in itself enough of 
dignity and true scientific character not to need to borrow 
aught of either from association with other branches of 
inquiry, which differ from it in subject and scope, while yet 
they seek by corresponding methods the same ultimate object, 
the increase of knowledge, and the advancement of man in 
comprehension of himself and of the universe. 


54 GENERAL METHOD [LECT 


We return, now, from this necessary digression, to follow 
onward our leading inquiry, “Why we speak as we do?” 
And we have to push the question a step further than in the 
last lecture, asking this time, not simply how. we ourselves 
came into possession of the signs of which our mother- 
tongue is made up, but also how those from whom we 
learned them came into possession of them before us; how 
the tradition from whose hands we implicitiy accepted them 
got them in the form in which it passed them on to us; 
why our words, in short, are what they are, and not other- 
wise. We have seen that évery part and particle of every 
existing language is a historical product, the final result of a 
series of changes, working themselves out in time, under 
the pressure of circumstances, and by the guidance of 
motives, which are not beyond the reach of our discovery. 
This fact preseribes the mode in which language is to be 
fruitfully studied. If we would understand anything which 
has become what it is, a knowledge of its present constitu- 
tion is not enough: we must follow it backward from stage 
to stage, tracing out the phases it has assumed, and the 
causes iyhich have determined the transition of one into the 
other. Merely to classify, arrange, and set forth in order 
the phenomena of a spoken tongue, its significant material, 
usages and modes of expression, is grammar and lexicography, 
not ‘linguistic science. The former state and prescribe only ; 
the latter seeks to explain. And when the explanation is 
historical, the search for it must be of the same character. 
To construct, then, by historical processes, with the aid of 
all the historical evidences within his reach, the history of 
development of language, back to its very beginning: is the 
main task of the linguistic student; it is the means by 
which he arrives at a true comprehension of language, in its 
own nature and in its relations to the human mind and 
to human history. 

Furthermore, it is hardly necessary to point out that the 
history of language reposes on that of words. Language is 
made up of signs for thought, which, though in one sense 
parts of a Bakelee are in another anid more essential sense 
isolated and independent entities. Each is produced for its 


T.] OF LINGUISTIC STUDY. 55 


own purpose; each is separately exposed to the changes and 
vicissitudes of linguistic life, is modified, recombined, or 
dropped, according to its own uses and capacities. Hence 
etymology, the historical study of individual words, is the 
foundation and substructure of all investigation of languag ge ; 
the broad principles, the wide-reaching views, the truths. of 
universal application and importance, which constitute the 
upper fabric of linguistic science, all rest upon word-genealo- 
cies. Words are the single witnesses from whom etymology 
draws out the testimony which they have to give raaieckie 
themselves, the tongue to which they belong, and all human 
speech. 

How the study of words is made the means of bringing 

to light the processes of linguistie growth, and what those 
processes are, it will, accordingly, be our next duty to ex- 
amine and set forth by suitable examples. Having only 
illustration in view, we will avoid all cases of a difficult or 
doubtful character, noticing only words whose history is 
well known; choosing, moreover, those which, while they 
truly exhibit the principles we seek to establish, are at the 
same time of the simplest kind, and most open to general 
comprehension. 

There is no word or class of words whose history does 
not exemplify, more or less fully, all the different kinds of 
linguistic change. It will be more convenient for us, how- 
ever, to take up these kinds in succession, and to select our 
instances accordingly. And, as the possibility of etymo- 
logical analysis depends in no small part on the nature of 
words as not simple entities, but made up of separate ele- 
ments, this composite character of the constituents of speech 
may properly engage our first attention. 

That we are in the constant habit of putting together two 
independent vocables to form a compound word, is an ob- 
vious and familiar fact. Instances of such words mre Your ves 
spiring, god-like, break-neck, house-top. They are substitutes 
for the equivalent phrases inspiring fear, like a god, apt to 
break one’s neck, top of a house. Yor the sake of more com- 
pact and convenient expression, we have given a closer 
unity to the compound word than belongs to the aggregate 


56 COMPOUNDED WORDS. [LECT. 


which it represents, by omission of connectives, by inversion 
of the more usual order of arrangement, but most of all by 
unity of accent: this last is the chief outward means of 
composition ; it converts two entities into one, for the 
nonce, by subordinating the one of them to the other. Our 
common talk is strewn with such words, and so gradual is 
the transition to them from the mere collocations of the 
phrase, that there are couples, like mother-tongue, well- 
known, which we hardly know whether to write separately, 
as collocations only, or with a hyphen, as loose compounds ; 
others, like dial-plate, well-being, usage so far recognizes for 
compounds that they are always written together, sometimes 
with the hyphen and sometimes without; others yet, like 
godlike, herself, are so grown together by long contact, by 
habitual connection, that we hardly think of them as having 
a dual nature. And even more than this: we have formed 
some so close combinations that it costs us a little reflection 
to separate them into their original parts. Of such a 
character is forehead, still written to accord with its deriva- 
tion, as a name for the fore part of the head, but so altered 
in pronunciation that, but for its spelling, its origin would 
certainly escape the notice of nineteen-twentieths of those 
who use it. Such, again, is fortnight, altered both in pro- 
nunciation and in spelling from the fourteen nights out of 
which it grew. Such, once more, is our familiar verb break- 
Jast. We gave this name to our morning meal, because it 
broke, or interrupted, the longest fast of the day, that which 
includes the night’s sleep. We said at first break fast—* I 
broke fast at such an hour this morning :” he, or they, who 
first ventured to say I breakfasted were guilty of as heinous 
a violation of grammatical rule as he would be who should 
now declare I takedinnered, instead of I took dinner; but 
good usage came over to their side and ratified their blunder, 
because the community were minded to give a specific name 
to their earliest meal and to the act of partaking of it, and 
therefore converted the collocation bredkfést into the real 
compound bréakfast. 

Yet once more, not only are those words in our language 
of composite structure, of which st first sight, or on second 


Ti. | COMPOUNDED WORDS. 57 


thought, we thus recognize the constituent elements; not a 
few, also, which we should not readily conjecture to be other 
than simple and indivisible entities, and which could not be 
proved otherwise by any evidence which our present speech 
contains, do nevertheless, when we trace their history by the 
aid of other and older languages than ours, admit of analysis 
into component parts. We will note, as instances, only a 
familiar word or two, namely swch and which. The forms of 
these words in Anglo-Saxon are swyle and hwyle : with the lat 
ter of them the Scottish whilk for which quite closely agrees, 
and they also find their near correspondents in the German 
solch and welch. On following up their genealogy, from lan- 
guage to language of our family, we find at last that the 
are made up of the ancient words for so and who, with the 
adjective like added to each: such is so-like, ‘ of that likeness 
or sort ;’ which is who-like, ‘ of what likeness or sort.’ 

But we turn from compounds like these, in which two 
originally independent words are fully fused into one, in 
meaning and form, to another class, of much higher import- 
ance in the history of language. 

Let us look, first, at our word fearful. This, upon reflec- 
tion, is a not less evident compound than Sear-inspiring : 
our common adjective full is perfectly recognizable as its 
final member. Yet, though such be its palpable origin, it 
is, after all, a compound of a somewhat different character 
from the other, The subordinate element full, owing to its 
use in a similar way in a great number of other compounds, 
such as careful, truthful, plentiful, dutiful, and the frequent 
and familiar occurrence of the words it forms, has, to our 
apprehension, in some measure lost the consciousness of its 
independent character, and sunk to the condition of a mere 
suffix, forming adjectives from nouns, like the suffix ous in 
such words as perilous, riotous, plenteous, duteous. It ap- 
proaches, too, the character of a suffix, in that its compounds 
are not, like fear-inspiring and house-top, directly translatable 
back into the elements which form them: plentiful and duti- 
fui do not mean ‘full of plenty’ and ‘full of duty,’ but are 
the precise equivalents of plenteous and duteous. We could 
with entire propriety form an adjective from a new noun by 


58 DERIVATION OF AFFIXES [ LECT. 


adding ful to it, without concerning ourselves as to whether 
the corresponding phrase, “ full of so and so,” would or would 
not make good sense, And when we hear a Scotchman say 
fearfw, carefw, we both understand him without difficulty, 
and do not think of inquiring whether he also clips the ad- 
jective full to fw’. 

The word of opposite meaning, fearless, is not less readily 
recognizable as a. compound, and our first impulse is to see 
in its final element our common word Jess, to interpret fear- 
less as meaning ‘minus fear, ‘deprived of fear,’ and so ‘ ex- 
empt from fear.’ A little study of the history of such words, 
however, as it is to be read in other dialects, shows us that 
this is a mistake, and that our /ess has nothing whatever to 
do with the compound. The Angio-Saxon form of the end- 
ing, leas, is palpably the adjective leas, which is the same 
with our word loose ; and fearless is primarily ‘loose from 
fear,’ ‘ free from fear.’ The original subordinate member of 
the compound has here gone completely through the process 
of conversion into a suflix, being so divorced trom the words 
which are really akin with it that its derivation is greatly 
obscured, and a false etymology is suggested to the mind 
which reflects upon it. 

Take, again, such words as godly, homely, brotherly, lovely. 
Here, as in the other cases, each is composed of two parts ; 
but, while we recognize the one as a noun, having an inde- 
pendent existence in the language, we do not even feel 
tempted to regard the other as anything but an adjective 
suffix, destitute of separate significance ; it appears in our 
usage only as an appendage to other words, impressing upon 
them a certain modification of meaning. What, however, is 
its history? Upon tracing it up into the older form of our 
speech, the Anglo-Saxon, we find that our modern usage has 
mutilated it after the same fashion as the Scottish dialect 
now mutilates the ful of fearful—by dropping off, namely, 
an original final consonant: its earlier form was lic. The 
final guttural letter we find preserved even to the present 
day in the corresponding suffixes of the other Germanic 
languages, as in the German lich, Swedish lig, Dutch lyk. 
These facts lead us naturally to the zonjecture that the so- 


II. | FROM INDEPENDENT WORDS. 5S 


called suffix may be nothing more than a metamorphosis of 
our common adjective like; and a reference to the oldest 
Germanic dialect, the Meso-Gothic, puts the case beyond 
all question ; for there we find the suffix and the independ- 
ent adjective to be in all respects the same, and the deriva- 
tives formed with the suffix to be as evident compounds with 
the adjective as are our own godlike, childlike, and so on. 
Words thus composed are common in all the Germanic 
tongues; but we who speak English have given the same 
suffix a further modification of meaning, and an extension of 
application, which belong to it nowhere else. In our usage 
it is an adverbial suffix, by which any adjective whatever 
may be converted into an adverb, as in truly, badly, fearfully, 
fearlessly. In the old Anglo-Saxon, such adverbs were ob- 
lique cases of adjectives in lic, and so, of course, were 
derived only from adjectives formed by this ending ; the full 
adverbial suffix was lice, the e being a case- termination : in- 
stances are dnilice, ‘only, singularly, from dnlic, ‘ sole, sin- 
gular,’ literally ‘one-like;’ Jedflice, ‘lovelily,’ from ledflic, 
‘lovely.’ We moderns, now, have suffered the ending to go 
out of use as one forming adjectives, only retaining the ad- 
jectives so formed which we have inherited from the ancient 
time ; but we have taken it up in its adverbial application, 
and, ignoring both its original character and its former 
Innitation to a single class of adjectives, apply it with un- 
restricted freedom in making an adverb from any adjective 
we choose; while, at the same time, we have mutilated its 
form, casting off as unnecessary the vowel ending, along 
with the consonant to which it was appended, The history 
of this adverbial suffix is worthy of special notice, inasmuch 
as the suffix itself is the latest addition which our grammati- 
cal system has gained in the synthetic way, and as its 
elaboration has taken place during the period when the 
growth of our language is illustrated by contemporary 
documents. The successive steps were clearly as follows 

the adjective like was first added to a number of nouns, 
forming a considerable class of adjective compounds, like 
those now formed by us with full ; then, like the latter word, 
it lost in a measure the consciousness of its origin, and was 


60 DERIVATION OF AFFIXES [LRU 


regarded rather as.a suffix, forming derivative adjectives; 
one of the oblique cases of these adjectives was next often 
employed in an adverbial sense ; and the use of the suffix in 
its extended form and with its modified application grew in 
importance and frequency, until finally it threw quite into 
the shade and supplanted the adjective use—and the inde- 
pendent adjective had become a mere adverbial ending. 
The mutilation of its form went hand in hand with this 
obliviousness of its origin and with its transferral to a new 
cilice ; each helped on the other. 

Another Germanic suffix, ship, as in friendship, worship, 
lordship, is distinctly traceable to its origin in the independ- 
ent word shape ; and its transition of meaning, from ‘ form’ 
to ‘aspect, condition, status, rank, though perhaps less ob- 
vious than those which we have already noted, is evidently 
a natural and easy one. 

A case of somewhat greater difficulty is presented us in 
such forms as J loved. Here the final d is, as we say, the 
sign of the preterit tense, added to the root Jove in order to 
adapt it to the expression of past time; and, from the evi- 
dence presented in our own language, no suspicion of its 
derivation from an independent word would ever cross our 
minds. Nor does the Anglo-Saxon, nor any other of the 
Germanic dialects of the same period, cast any light upon 
its origin. Since, however, such a sign of past time is one 
of the distinctive features of the Germanic group of lan- 
guages, and is found nowhere else in the greater family to 
which these belong, we cannot help assuming that it has 
grown up in them sinee their separation from the rest of the 
family : just as the adverbial suffix Zy, which is peculiar to 
our own tongue, has grown up in it since its separation 
from the other Germanic tongues. It is therefore a form 
of comparatively modern introduction, and we might hope 
to trace out its genesis. This is, in fact, disclosed to us by 
the Mceso-Gothic, the most ancient Germanic dialect, which 
stands toward the rest in somewhat the same relation as the 
Anglo-Saxon to the English; in its primitive and uncor- 
rupted forms we see clearly that the preterits in question 
are made by appending to the root of the verb the past 


11.] FROM INDEPENDENT WORDS. 61 


tense of another verb, namely did, from to do. We tamed ia 
in Meeso-Gothie tamidédum, which means not less evidently 
tame-did-we than the Anglo-Saxon séthlice, ‘ soothly, truly,’ 
means ‘in a sooth-like (truth-like) way.’ J loved is, then, 
originally I love did, that is, I did love—as, unconsciously 
repeating in another way the same old act of composition, 
we now almost as often say. The history of the suffix has 
been quite like that of the ly of truly, save that it happened 
longer ago, and is therefore more difficult to read. 

All our illustrations hitherto have been taken from the 
Germanic part of our language, and they have all been forms 
which are peculiar to the Germanic dialects, and which we 
have therefore, as already remarked, every reason to believe 
of later date than the separation of that group of dialects 
from the other tongues with which it stands related. Yet, 
with the exception of the adverbial application of the suffix 
ly, they are all anterior to the time at which we first make 
acquaintance with any Germanic tongue in contemporary 
records. Our confidence in the reality of our etymological 
analysis, and in the justness of the inferences drawn from it, 
is not on that account any the less: we feel as sure that the 
words in question were made by putting together the two 
parts into which each is still resolvable as if “the whole pro- 
cess of composition had gone on under our own observation, 
If this were not so, if our conclusions respecting the growth 
of language were to be limited by the possession of strict 
documetitary evidence, our researches in linguistic history 
would be stopped almost. at the outset. Few languages 
have any considerable portion of their development illus- 
trated by contemporary records ; literature is wont, at the 
best, to cast light upon certain distinct epochs in the his- - 
tory of a dialect, leaving in obscurity the intervening periods ; 
nor do we ever, by such help, reach a point at all nearly 
approaching that of the actual origin of speech. Hence the 
necessity resting upon the etymologist of interrogating the 
material of language itself, of making words yield up, on 
examination, their own history. He applies the analogy of 
processes of change and development which are actually 
going on in language to explain the earlier results of the 


62 DERIVATION OF AFFIXES [ LECT. 


same or like processes. And, if he work with due caution 
and logical strictness, his results are no more exposed to 
question than are those of the geologist, who infers, from 
the remains of animal and vegetable organisms in deeply- 
buried rocks, the deposition of those rocks in a period when 
animal and vegetable life, analogous with that of our own 
day, was abundant. 

If, now, we turn our attention to other portions of our 
English speech, to those which come to us from the Latin, 
or which are of an ancient and primitive growth, we note 
the same condition of things as prevailing there also. The 
subject admits of the most abundant and varied illustration, 
but we must limit ourselves to but an instance or two. 

In the series of multiplicative numerals, double, triple, 
quadruple, quintuple, and so on, we have a suffix ple, which 
is the principal indicator of the grammatical quality of the 
words. On following them up into the Latin, whence we 
derive them, we find this brief ending to be a mutilated 
remnant of the syllable plic, which is a well-known root, 
meaning ‘ to bend, to fold.” Dowdle is thus by origin duplic, 
by abbreviation from duo-plic, and is, in sense, the precise 
Latin equivalent of our Germanic word two-fold. We still 
retain the fuller form in duplicate, the learned synonym of 
double. 

Again, one of the oldest words in our familiar speech is am, 
the first person of the verb Zo be, nor do we see in it any signs 
of being otherwise than simple and indivisible. As, how- 
ever, we trace its history of changes backward, from one to 
another of the languagés with which our own claims kindred, 
we are enabled to discover that its two sounds are the scanty 
relics of two separate elements: the first, a, is all that re- 
mnains of an original syllable as, which expressed the idea of 
existence; the other, m, represents an ending, mi, which, 
originally a pronoun, and having the same meaning as the 
same word, me, still has with us, was employed to limit the 
predicate of existence to the person speaking: it was, in 
fact, the suffix universally employed, during the earliest 
period in the history of our family of languages, to form the 
first persons singular of verbs. Am, then, really contains a 


11. | FROM INDEPENDENT WORDS. 63 


verb and its subject pronoun, and means ‘ be-I;’ that is, ‘I 
exist.’ The third person of the same verb, is, possesses 
virtually a similar character, although linguistic usage, in its 
caprice, has dealt somewhat differently with it. As am 
stands for as-mt, ‘ be-I,’ so 7s stands for as-ti, ‘ be-that :’ 
have, indeed, warn off the second element altogether, so that 
our zs is the actual representative only of the radical sylla- 
ble as; but by far the greater number of the Germanic dia- 
lects, and of the other descendants from the primitive 
tongue in which was first formed the compound as¢i, have 
retained at least the initial consonant of the pronominal 
suffix: witness the German isé, the Slavonian yest, the Latin 
est, the Greek and Lithuanian esti, the Sanserit astz, and so 
on. It is the same ¢ which, in the form of ¢h or s, still does 
service in the regular scheme of conjugation of our verbs, as 
ending of the third person singular present: thus, he loveth 
or loves. 

The examples already given may sufficiently answer our 
purpose as illustrations of the way in which suffixes are pro- 
duced, and grammatical classes or categories of words created. 
The adjectives i in ful, or the adjectives i in Jess, form together 
a Relntad croup, having a common aarbted: as dovwatives 
from nouns, and derivatives possessing a kindred significance, 
standing in a certain like relation to their primitives, filling 
a certain common office in speech, an office of which the sign 
is the syllable fwl, or less, their final member or suffix. With 
ly, this is still more notably the case: the suffix ly is the 
usual sign of adverbial meaning ; it makes much the largest 
share of all the adverbs we have. A final m, added to a 
verbal root, in an early stage of the history of our mother- 
tongue, aiid yet more anciently an added syllable m7, made 
in like manner the first persons singular present of rerbs: 
as an added s, standing for an original syllable ¢, does eve 
to the present day make our third persons singular. Ail 
these grammatical signs were once independent ciezents, 
words of distinct meaning, appended to other words and com- 
pounded with them—appended, not in one or two isolated 
eases only, but so often, and in a sense so generally appli- 
cable, that they formed whole classes of compounds, There 


64 ACCUMULATION OF AFFIXES. [LEOT 


was nothing about them save this extensibility of their appli- 
cation and frequency of their use to distinguish their com- 
pounds from such as house-top, break-neck, forehead, fortnight, 
and the others of the same class to which we have already 
referred. Yet this was quite enough to bring about a change 
of their recognized character, from that of distinct words to 
that of non-significant appendages to other words. Each 
passed over into the condition of a formative element ; that 
is to say, an element showing the logical form, the gram- 
matical character, of a derivative, as distinguished from its 
primitive, the word to which the sign was appended. There 
was a time when fear-full, fear-loose, fear-free, free-making, 
fear-struck, love-like, love-rich, love-sick, love-lorn, were all 
words of the same kind, mere lax combinations; it was only 
their different degree of availability for answering the ends 
of speech, for supplying the perceived needs of expression, 
that caused two or three of them to assume a different cha- 
racter, while the rest remained as they had been. 

Often, as every one knows, there is an accumulation of 
formative elements in the same word. In ¢ruthfully, for ex- 
ample, we have the adverbial suffix Zy added to the primitive 
truthful ; in which, again, the adjective suffix ful has per- 
formed the same oflice toward the remoter primitive truth. 
By the use of a formative element of another kind, a prefix, 
we might have made the yet more intricate compound un- 
truthfully. Nay, further, truth itself contains a suffix, and is 
a derivative from the adjective trwe, as appears from its 
analogy with wealth from well, width from wide, strength from 
strong, and many other like words; and even true, did we 
trace its history to the beginning, we should find ending in 
a formative element, and deriving its origin from a verbal 
root meaning ‘ to be firm, strong, reliable.’ The Latin part 
of our language, which includes most of our many-syllabled 
words, offers abundant instances of a similar complicated 
structure. Thus, the term dnapplicabilities contains two 
prefixes, the negative in and the preposition ad which means 
‘to,’ and three suffixes, able, forming adjectives, ty, forming 
abstract nouns from adjectives, and s, the plural ending, all 
clustered about the verbal root plic, which we have already 


1. | ALL OUR WORDS ORIGINALLY COMPOUND. C 


Cia 


seen itself forming a suffix, in double, triple, and so forth, and 
which conveys the idea of ‘ bending’ or ‘ folding” By sue- 
cessive extensions and modifications of meaning, by transferval 
from one category to another through means of their appro- 
priate signs, we have developed this simple idea into a form 
which can only be represented by the long paraphrase 
‘numerous conditions of being not able to bend (or fit) to 
something.’ | 

With but few exceptions—which, moreover, are only ap- 
parent ones—all the words of our language admit of such 
analysis as this, which discovers in them at least two 
elements, whereof the one conveys the central or fundamental 
idea, and the other indicates a restriction, application, or 
relation of that idea. Even those brief vocables which 
appear to us of simplest character can be proved either to, 
exhibit still, like am for as-mi, the relic of a mutilated forma- 
tive element, or, like zs for as-ti, to have lost one which 
they formerly possessed. This, then, in our language (as in 
the whole family of languages to which ours is related), is 
the normal constitution of a word: it invariably contains a 
radical and a formal portion ; it is made up of a root combined 
with a suffix, or with a suffix and prefix, or with more than 
one of each. In more technical phrase, no word is unformed; 
no one has been a mere significant entity, without designa- 
tion of its relation, without a sign putting it in some class 
or category. 

It is plain, therefore, that a chief portion of linguistic 
analysis must consist, notin the mere dismembering of such 
words as we usually style compounded, but in the distinction 
from one another of radical and formal elements; in the 
isolation of the central nucleus, or root, from the affixes 
which have become attached to it, and the separate recogni- 
tion of each affix, in its individual form and office. Bat our 
illustrations have, as I think, made it not less plain that 
there is no essential and ultimate difference in the two cases : 
in the one, as in the other, our process of analysis is the re- 
tracing of a previous synthesis, whereby two independent 
elements were combined and integrated. That this is so to 
a certain extent is a truth so palpable as to admit of neither 


66 ALL FORMATIVE ELEMENTS [LEOT, 


cenial nor doubt. Had there been in the German’e Jan- 
guages no such adjective as full, no such derivative adjectives 
as fearful and truthful would have grown up in them ; if they 
had possessed no adjective like, they would never have gained 
such adjectives as godly and lovely, nor such adverbs as fear- 
Sully and truly. So also with friendship, with loved, with 
am and is, and the rest. No inconsiderable number of the 
formative elements of our tongue, in every department of 
grammar and of word-formation, can be thus traced back to 
independent words, with which they were at first identical, 
out of which they have grown. It is true, at the same time, 
that a still larger number do not allow their origin to be 
discovered. But we have not, on that account, the right to 
conclude that their history is not of the same character. In 
grammar, as everywhere else, like effects presuppose like 
causes. We have seen how the formative elements are 
liable to become corrupted and altered, so that the signs of 
their origin are obscured, and may even be obliterated. The 
full in truthful is easy enough to recognize, but a little his- 
torical research is necessary in order to show us the like 
which is contained in truly. Hateful is, for aught we know, 
as old a compound as lovely, but linguistic usage has chanced 
to be more merciful to the evidence of descent in the former 
case than in the latter. A yet more penetrating investiga- 
tion is required ere we discover our pronoun me in the word 
_am, or our imperfect did in I loved; and, but for the happy 
chance that preserved to us the one or two fragmentary 
manuscripts in which are contained our only records of 
Moeso-Gothic speech, the genesis of the latter form would 
always have remained an unsolved problem, a subject for in- 
genious conjecture, but beyond the reach of demonstration. 
The loss of each intermediate stage, coming between any 
given dialect and its remotest ancestor, wipes out a portion 
of the evidence which would explain the origin of its forms. 
If English stood all alone among the other languages of the 
earth, but an insignificant part of its word-history could be 
read ; its kindred dialects, contemporary and older, help us 
to tne discovery of a much larger portion ; and the preserva- 
tion of authentic records of every period of its life would, 


i] ORIGINALLY INDEPENDENT WORDS. 67 


as we cannot hesitate to believe, make clear the rest. There 
is no break in the chain of analogical reasoning which com- 
pels the linguistic student to the conviction that his analyses 
are everywhere real, and distinguish those elements by the 
actual combination of which words were originally made up. 
On this conviction rests, for him, the value of his analytical 
processes: if they are to be regarded as in part historical 
and real, in part only theoretical and illusory, his researches 
into the history of language are baffled ; he is in pursuit of 
a phantom, and not of truth. 

Wherever, then, our study of words brings us to the re- 
cognition of an element having a distinct meaniny and office, 
employed in combination with other elements for the uses of 
expression, there we must recognize an originally independ- 
ent entity. The parts of our words were once themselves 
words. 

Some of the remoter consequences involved in this prin- 
ciple will engage our attention at a more advanced stage of 
our inquiries into the history of human speech: our present 
purpose only requires us to notice that, since all known 
words have been constructed by putting together previously 
existing items of speech, the combination of old materials 
into new forms, the making of compounds, with frequent ac- 
companying reduction of one of their members to a merely 
formal significance, is a very preminent part of the mechan- 
ism of language, one of the most fundamental and important 
of the processes by which are carried on its perpetual 
growth and change, its organic development. What otoer 
processes are “he concomitants and auxilaries of this ane, 
we shall go or to inquire in the next lecture. 


LECTURE III. 


Phonetic change; its ground, action on compound words, part in word. 
making, and destructive effects. Replacement of one mode of formal 
distinction by another. Extension of analogies. Abolition of valuable 
distinctions. Conversion of sounds into one another. Physical cha- 
racters of alphabetic sounds; physical scheme of the English alphabet. 
Obsolescence and loss of words. Changes of meaning; their ground 
and methods. Variety of meanings of one word. Synonyms. 
Conversion of physical into spiritual meaning, Attenuation of mean- 
ing; production of form-words. Variety of derivatives from one 
root. Unreflectiveness of the process of making names and forms. 
Conceptions antedate their names. Reason of a name historical, and 
founded in convenience, not necessity. Insignificance of derivation 
in practical use of language. 


Ir will be our present task to continue the examination 
and illustration of the processes of linguistic growth which 
we began at our last interview. We completed at that time 
our preliminary inquiries into the mode of preservation and 
transmission of language, and were guided by them to a 
recognition of the true nature of the force which alone is 
efficient in all the operations of linguistic life—the events, 
as we may more properly style them, of linguistic history. It 
was found to be the will of men: every word that exists, 
exists only as it is uttered or written by the voluntary effort 
of human organs ; it is changed only by an action proceeding 
from individuals, and ratified by the general consent of speak- 
ers and writers. Language, then, is neither an organism 
nor a physical product ; and its study is not a physical but 
a moral science, a branch of the history of the human race 
and of buman institutions. The method of its investigation 


III. | PHONETIC CORRUPTION. 6g 


is histcrical, an endeavour to trace backward—even to the 
beginning, if the recorded evidence permit—the processes 
by which our own speech, or human speech in general, has 
become what it is, and to discover the rationale of those pro- 
eesses, the influences under which they have been carried 
on, and the ends which they have been intended to subserve. 
We took up first, accordingly, the process of combination 
of old material in language into new forms, and exhibited its 
universal agency in the production of the present constitu- 
ents of speech. Not only are words put together to form 
what to our sense are and still remain ordinary compounds, 
but such compounds are further fused into a deceitful like- 
ness to simple vocables; or, what is of yet more frequent 
occurrence and more important bearing, one of their mem- 
bers sinks to a subordinate position, and becomes a suflix, 
without recognized separate signification. This, it was 
claimed, is the way in which all formative elements, all signs 
of grammatical categories, have originated; and as every 
word in our language either contains, or has contained and 
been deprived of, a formative element, or more than one, the 
process of composition is one whose range and importance 
in linguistic history cannot easily be over-estimated. 

But the same examples on which we relied to show how, 
and how extensively, words are compounded together and 
forms produced, have shown us not less clearly that mutila- 
tion and loss of the elements employed by language, and of 
the compounds and forms into which they enter, are also 
constant accompaniments of linguistic growth. “ All that 
is born must die’ seems a law almost as inexorable in the 
domain of speech as in that of organic life. We have next 
to turn our attention to the principles underlying this de- 
partment of linguistic change, and to some of the modes of 
its action and tke effects which it produces. 

And the first and most important principle which we 
have to notice, the one which lies at the bottom of nearly 
all phonetic change in language, is the tendency, already 
alluded to and briefly illustrated in our first lecture, to make 
the work of utterance easier to the speaker, to put a more 
facile in the stead of a more difficult sound or combination 


70 PHONETIC CHANGE [LEcT, 


of sounds, and to get rid altogether of what is unnecessary 
in the words we use. All articulate sounds are produced by 
eflort, by expenditure of muscular energy, in the lungs, 
throat, and mouth. This effort, like every other which man 
makes, he has an instinctive disposition to seek relief from, 
to avoid: we may call it laziness, or we may call it economy ; 
it is, in fact, either the one or the other, according to the 
circumstances of each separate case: it is laziness when it 
gives up more than it gains; economy, when it gains more 
than it abandons. Every item of language is subject to its 
influence, and it works itself out in greatly various ways; 
we will give our first consideration to the manner in which 
its action accompanies, aids, and modifies that of the process 
of composition of old material into new forms, as last set 
forth. For it is composition, the building up of words out 
of elements formerly independent, that opens a wide field 
to the operation of phonetic change, and at the same time 
gives it its highest importance as an agency in the produc- 
tion and modification of language. If all words were of 
simple structure and brief form, their alterations would be 
confined within comparatively narrow limits, and would be 
of inferior consequence as constituting one of the processes 
of linguistic growth. Our adjective like, for example, is but 
slightly altered in our usage from the form which it had in 
the Anglo-Saxon (lic) and the Mcso-Gothic (letk) ; while, 
in the compounds into which it has entered, it is mutilated 
even past recognition: in the adjectives and adverbs like 
godly and truly, it has been deprived of its final consonant ; 
in such and which (A.-S. swyle, hwyle; M.-G. swaleik, hwaleik), 
it has saved only the final consonant, and that in a greatly 
modified shape. Our preterit did is, indeed, but a remnant 
of its older self, but in love-d it has reached a much lower 
stave of re .uction. 

The reason which makes phonetic change rifest in lin- 
guistic combinations is the same with that which ereates the 
possibility of any phonetic change at all in language, It is 
inherent in the nature of a word, and its relation to the 
idea which it represents. A word, as we have already seen, 
18 not the natural reflection of an idea, nor its description, 


TLL. | IN COMPOUND WORDS. 71 


nor its definition ; it is only its designation, an arbitrary 
and conventional sign with which we learn to associate it. 
Hence it has no internal force conservative of its identity, 
but is exposed to all the changes which external cireum- 
stances, the needs of practical use, the convenience and 
eaprice of those who employ it, may suggest. When we 
have once formed a compound, and applied it to a given 
purpose, we are not at all solicitous to keep up the memory 
of its origin; we are, rather, ready to forget it. The word 
once coined, we accept it as an integral representative of 
the conception to which we attach it, and give our whole 
attention to that, not concerning ourselves about its deriva- 
tion, or its etymological aptness. Practical convenience be- 
comes tae paramount consideration, to which every other is 
made to give way. Let us look at an example or two. There 
is a certain class of insects, the most brilliant and beautiful 
which the entomologist knows. Its most common species, 
both in the Old world and the New, are of a yellow colour; 
clouds of these yellow flutterers, at certain seasons, swarm 
upon the roads and fill the air. Because, now, butter is or 
ought to be yellow, our simple and wnromantie ancestors 
called the insect in question the butéerfly, as they called a cer- 
tain familiar yellow flower the buttercup. In our usage, this 
word has become the name, not of the yellow species only, 
but of the whole class. And, though its form is unmutilated, 
and its composition as clear as on the day when the words 
were first put together to make it, probably not one person 
in a hundred of those who employ it has ever thought of its 
origin, or considered why it was applied to the use in which 
it serves him. We no longer invest it with the paltry and 
prosaic associations which, from its derivation, would naturally 
cluster about it; it has become, from long alliance in our 
thoughts with the elegant creatures which it designates, in- 
stinct with poetic beauty and grace. 

Again, some ancient navigator, who discovered a certain 
huge island on the north-eastern coast of America, had not 
ingenuity enough to devise a better appellation for it than 
the new-found land. Such a name was evidently no more 
applicable to this than to any other of the newly-discovered 


"2 OBLIVION OF DERIVATION. [veEcrt. 


regions in that age of discovery, yet men learned by degrees 
to employ it as the proper title of this particular island, 
At first, doubtless, they pronounced it distinctly, new-found 
land ; but no sooner had the words fully acquired the charac- 
ter of a specific name for a single thing, than they began to 
receive the stamp of formal unity, by the accentuation of one 
of the three syllables, and the subordination of the rest, in 
quantity and distinctness of tone. There was, to be sure, a 
difficulty about deciding which of three constituents of so 
nearly equal value should receive the principal stress of 
voice, and our practice varies even now between Newfotnd- 
land and Néwfoiindland, while we occasionally even hear WVew- 
Joiindlind: but good usage will finally decide in favour of 
one of these modes, and will reject the others. How little 
is the primary meaning of the compound present to the 
minds of those who utter it! And when, transferring the 
name of the island to one of its most noted products, we 
speak of some one as “the fortunate owner of a fine New- 
foundland,” how little we realize that, in terms, we are as- 
serting his lordship over a recently discovered territory ! 
The two words which we have instanced have suffered no 
modification, or only a very slight one, of their original form 
since they were put together out of separate elements, But it 
is clear enough that this readiness to forget the etymologi- 
cal meaning of a word in favour of its derivative application, 
to sink its native condition in its official character, prepares 
the way for mutilation and mutation. We have put toge- 
ther, to form the title of a certain petty naval officer, the 
two words Joat and swain, and we know what the word 
means, and why: the sailors, too, know what, but the why 
is a matter of indifference to them ; they have no leisure for 
a full pronunciation of such cumbrous compounds as bdat- 
swdin; they cut it down to bos’n ; and it is a chance if a 
single one among them who has not learned to read and 
write can tell you how he of the whistle comes by such a title. 
So also, the mariner calls to’gal nts’ls what we land-lubbers 
know by the more etymologically correct, but more lumber- 
ing, name of fopgallantsails. And these are but typical ex. 
ainples of what has been the history of language from the 


Ill.} | VALUABLE ACTION OF PHONETIC CORRUPTION. 73 


begining. No sooner have men coined a word than they 
have begun—not, of course, with deliberate forethought, 
but spontaneously, and as it were unconsciously—to see 
how the time and labour expended in its utterance could be 
economized, how any complicated and difficult combination 
of sounds which it presented could be worked over into a 
shape better adapted for fluent utterance, how it could be 
contracted into a briefer form, what part of it could be 
spared without loss of intelligibility. 

Thus—to recur to some of our former ilustrations—as 
soon as we are ready to forego our separate memory of the 
constituents of such compounds as bredk-fast, Sore-hiad, four- 
teen-night, that we may give a more concentrated attention to 
the unity of signification which we confer upon them, we be- 
gin to convert them into bréakfust, fired, Jortnit. And the 
case is the same with all those combinations out of which eTrow 
formative elements and forms. While we have clearly in mind 
the genesis of god-like, father-like, and so forth, we are little 
likely to mutilate either part of them: our apprehension of 
the latter element as no longer eodrdinate with the former, 
but as an appendage to it, impressing upon it a modification 
of meaning, and our reduction of the subordinate element to 
ly, thus turning the words into godly and fatherly, are pro- 
cesses that go hand in hand together, each helping the other. 

This brings us to a recognition of the important and valu- 
able part played by the tendency to ease of utterance, and 
by the phonetic changes which it prompts, in the construe- 
tion of the fabric of language. If a word is to be taken 
fully out of the condition of constituent member of a come. 
pound, and made a formative element, if a compound is thus 
to be converted into a form; or otherwise fused together into 
an integral word, it must be by the help of some external 
modification. Our words thankful, Jearful, truthful, and 
their hke, are, by our too present apprehension of the inde- 
pendent significance of their final syllable, kept out of the 
category of pure derivatives. Phonetic corruption makes 
the difference between a genuine form-word, like godly, and 
& combination like godlike, which is far less plastic and 
adantable te the varying needs of practical use; it mokes tha 


74 PHONETIC CORRUPTION MAKES [LEcT. 


difference between a synthetic combination, like I loved, and 
a mere analytic collocation, like J did love. It alone renders 
possible true grammatical forms, which make the wealth and 
power of every inflective language. We sometimes laugh at 
the unwieldiness of the compounds which our neighbour lan- 
guage, the German, so abundantly admits; words like Ritter- 
guisbesitzer, ‘ knight’s-property-possessor,’ or Schuhmacher- 
handwerk, ‘ cobbier’s-trade,’ seem to us too cumbrous for use; 
but half the vocabies in our own tongue would be as bulky 
and awkward, but for the abbreviation which phonetic change 
has wrought upon them. Without it, such complicated de- 
rivatives as wntruthfully, inapplicabilities, would have no 
advantage over the tedious paraphrases with which we should 
now render their precise etymological meaning. 

Change, retrenchment, mutilation, disguise of derivation is, 
then, both the inevitable and the desirable accompaniment of 
such composition as has formed the vocabulary of our spoken 
tongue. It stands connected with tendencies of essential 
consequence, and is part of the wise economy of speech. It 
contributes to conciseness and force of expression. It is the 
sign and means of the integration of words. It disencum- 
bers terms of traditional remembrances, which would other- 
wise disturb the unity of attention that ought to be concen- 
trated upon the sign in its relation to the thing signified. It 
makes of a word, instead of a congeries of independent enti- 
ties, held together by a loose bond and equally crowding 
themselves upon the apprehension, a unity, composed of duly 
subordinated parts. 

But the tendency which works out these valuable results 
is, at the same time, a blind, or, to speak more exactly, an 
unreflecting one, and its action is also in no small measure 
destructive ; it pulls down the very edifice which it helps to 
build. Its direct aim is simply ease and convenience; it 
seeks, as we have seen, to save time and labour to the users 
of language. There may be, it is evident, waste as well as 
economy in the gratification of such a tendency ; abbreviation 
may be carried beyond the limits of that which can be well 
dispensed with; ease and convenience may be consulted by 
the sacrifice of what is of worth, as well as by the rejection 


III. | AND UNMAKES WORDS. 75 


of what is unnecessary. No language, indeed, in the 
mouths fa people not undergoing mental and moral im. 
poverish nent, gives up, upon the whole, any of its resources 
of expression, lets go aught of essential value for which it 
does not retain or provide an equivalent. But an item may 
be dropped here and there, which, upon reflection, seems a 
regrettable loss. And a language may, at least, become 
greatly altered by the excessive prevalence of the wearing- 
out processes, abandoning much which in other and kindred 
languages is retained and valued, It is the more necessary 
that we take notice of the disorganizing and destructive 
workings of this tendency, inasmuch as our English speech 
is, above all other cultivated tongues upon the face of the 
earth, the one in which they have brought about the most 
radical and sweeping changes. 

It has already been remarked (p. 62) that, in the earliest 
traceable stage of growth of our language, the first person 
singular of its verbs was formed by an ending mi, of which 
the m in am is a relic, and the only one which we have left. 
In Latin, too, it remains in the present indicative of only 
two words, swm and inguam, and in Greek, in the compara- 
tively small class of “ verbs in mz,” like tithémi, didémi. But 
the history of verbal conjugation can be better illustrated by 
considering the changes wrought upon another set of endings, 
those of the plural. At the same early period of its develop- 
ment, the tongue from which ours is descended had an 
elaborate series of terminations to denote the first, second, 
and third persons plural of its verbs. In the oldest form in 
which we can trace them—when, however, they had already 
acquired the character of true formative elements—they 
were mast, tasi, and nti. By origin, they were pronominal 
compounds, which had “ grown on” to the end of the verbal 
root—that is to say, had first been habitually spoken in con- 
nection with the root, then attached to it, and finally inte- 
grated with it, in the manner already illustrated: they 
meant respectively, ‘I and thou’, i.e. ‘we’; ‘he and thou’, 
le. ‘ye’; and ‘they’. Thus lagamast, lagatasi, laganti, fox 
instance, signified at first, in a manner patent to every 
speaker’s apprehension, ‘lie-we ’, ‘lie-ye’, ‘lie-they’ ; it would 


76 DESTRUCTIVE EFFECTS [ LEST. 


have seermed as superfluous, in using these forms, to put the 
subject pronouns a second time before them, as it would seem 
to us now to say I did loved, for Iloved. But the consclous- 
ness of the origin of the endings becoming dimmed, and their 
independent meaning lost from view, they were left to under- 
go the inevitable process of reduction to a simpler form. 
As they appear in the Latin, they have suffered a first pro- 
cess of abbreviation, by rejection of the final vowel of each: 
they have become mus, tis, and nt, as in legimus, legitis, le- 
gunt, “we read, ye read, they read.’ The ancient Gothie, 
the most primitive of the Germanic dialects, exhibits them in 
a yet succincter form, the first two having been cut down to 
their initial letter only: thus, ligam, ligith, ligand. Thus far, 
each ending has, through all its changes, preserved its identity, 
and is adequate to its office ; however mutilated and corrupted 
in form, they are still well distinguished from one another, 
and sufficiently characteristic. But it was now coming to be 
usual to put the pronouns before the verb in speaking. At 
first added occasionally, for greater emphasis, they had, as the 
pronominal character of the endings faded altogether from 
memory, become customary attendants of the verb in all the 
persons—save as, in the third person, their place was taken 
by the more varied subjects which that person admits. Since, 
then, the expressed subjects were of themselves enough to 
indicate the person, distinctive endings were no longer 
needed. Under the influence of this consideration, the An- 
glo-Saxon had reduced all the plural terminations to one—ath 
in the present, on in the imperfect—saying we licgath, ge lic- 
guth, hi licgath. Although this last was, in its inception, 
much such a blunder as is now committed by the vulgar among 
ourselves who say J is, says I, and so on, it was adopted and 
ratified by the community, because it was only a carrying out 
of the legitimate tendency to neglect and eliminate distinctiona 
which are practically unnecessary ; and all the other Ger- 
manic dialects have done the same thing, in whole or in part. 
We, finally, have carried the process to its furthest pos- 
sible limit, by casting off the suffixes altogether ; and with 
them, in this particular verb, even the final consonant of tho 
root: us we say J lie, so we also say we lie, ye lie, they lie, 


III. ] OF PHONETIC CHANGE. 77 


We do not feel that we have thus sacrificed aught of that dis- 
tinctness of expression which should be aimed at in language ; 
we lie is not less unambiguous than lagamast ; it is, in fact, 
a composition of equivalent elements in another mode ; just 
as I did love is, in a different form, the same combination 
with I loved. 

In the declension of our nouns we have effected a more 
thorough revolution, if that be possible, than in the conjuga- 
tion of our verbs. The ancient tongue from which our Eng- 
lish is the remote descendant inflected its nouns, substantive 
and adjective, in three numbers, each containing eight cases. 
Of the numbers, the Anglo-Saxon had almost wholly given 
up one, the dual, retaining only scanty relics of it in the pro- 
nouns ; and, of the cases, it had in familiar use but four—the 
nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative—with traces of a 
fifth, the instrumental. The dual, indeed, on account of its 
little practical value, has disappeared in nearly all the modern 
languages of our family, its duties being assumed by the plural; 
and the prepositions have long been usurping the office of the 
case-endings, and rendering these dispensable. In English, 
now, all inflection of the adjective has gone out of use, and 
we have saved for our substantives only one of the cases, the 
genitive or possessive—to which a few of the pronouns add 
also an accusative or objective: thus, he, his, him, they, their, 
them, etc. Here, too, we should be loth to acknowledge that 
we have given up what the true purposes of language required 
us to keep, that we can speak our minds any less distinctly 
than our ancestors could, with all their apparatus of inflections. 

A remarkable example of the total abandonment of a con- 
spicuous department of grammatical structure, without any 
compensating substitution, is furnished in our treatment of 
the matter of gender. The grammatical distinction of words 
as. masculine, feminine, or neuter, by differences of termina- 
tion and differences of declension, had been from the very 
earliest period the practice of all the languages of the family 
to which the English belongs. It was applied not alone to 
names of objects actually possessed of sex, but to all, of what. 
ever kind, even to intellectual and abstract terms ; the whole 
language was the scene of an immense personification, where- 


78 ONE MODE OF FORMAL DISTINCTION [LEC?. 


by sexual qualities were attributed to everything in the world 
both of nature and of mind: often on the ground of concep-« 
tions and analogies which we find it excessively difficult to 
recognize and appreciate. This state of things still prevailed 
in the Anglo-Saxon: nouns were masculine, feminine, and 
neuter, according to the ancient tradition (for example, téth, 
‘tooth, was masculine ; syn, ‘sin, was feminine; and wif, 
‘wife, woman,’ was neuter); and every adjective and adjec- 
tive-pronoun was declined in the three genders, and made to 
agree with its noun in gender as well as in number and case, 
just as if it were Latin or Greek. But in that vast decay 
and ruin of grammatical forms which attended the elaboration 
of our modern English out of its Saxon and Norman elements, 
the distinctive suffixes of gender and declension have disap- 
peared along with the rest; and with them has disappeared 
this whole scheme of artificial distinctions, of such immemorial 
antiquity and wide acceptance. It has completely passed from 
our memory and our conception, leaving not a trace behind; 
the few pronominal forms indicative of sex which we have 
saved—namely, he, she, it, his and him, her, and its—we use 
only according to the requirements of actual sex or its 
absence, or to help a poetic personification ; and we think it 
very inconvenient, and even hardly fair, that, in learning 
French and German, we are called upon to burden ourselves 
with arbitrary and unpractical distinctions of grammatical 
gender. 

The disposition to rid our words of whatever in them 
is superfluous, or can be spared without detriment to dis- 
tinctness of expression, has led in our language, as in many 
others, to curious replacements of an earlier mode of indieat- 
ing meaning by one of later date, and of inorganic origin— 
that is to say, not produced for the purpose to which it 
is applied. Thus we have a few plurals, of which men from 
man, feet from foot, and mice from mouse are familiar ex- 
amples, which constitute noteworthy exceptions to our 
general rule for the formation of the plural number. Com- 
parison of the older dialects soon shows us that the change 
of vowel in such words as these was originally an accident 
only ; if was not significant, but euphonic ; it was called out 


IT. | REPLACED BY ANOT{ER. 79 


by the vowels of certain case-endings, which assimilated the 
vowels of the nouns to which they were attached. So little 
was the altered vowel in Anglo-Saxon a sign of plurality, 
that 16 was found also in one of the singular cases, while two 
of the plural cases exhibited the unchanged vowel of the 


theme. Man, for instance, was thus declined: 


Singular. Plural. 
Nom. MAN, ‘man’; MeN, ‘men,’ 
Gen. MANNECS, ‘man’s’; manna, ‘men’s.’ 
Dat. men ‘to man’; mannum, ‘to men,’ 
’ , b] 
Accus, MAN, ‘man’; MEN, ‘men.’ 


But the nominative and accusative singular exhibited 
one vowel, and the nominative and accusative plural another; 
and so this incidental difference of pronunciation between 
the forms of most frequent occurrence in the two numbers 
respectively came to appear before the popular apprehension 
as indicative of the distinction of number; its genesis was 
already long forgotten, as the case-endings which called it out 
had disappeared; and now it was fully invested with a new 
office—though only in a few rather arbitrarily selected cases: 
the word book, for example, has the same hereditary right to 
a plural beek, instead of books, as has foot to a plural feet, in- 
stead of foots.* The case is quite the same as if, at present, 
because we pronounce zdtional (with “short a”) the adjective 
derived from ndtion, we should come finally to neglect as 
unnecessary the suffix al, and should allow ndtion and 
nition to answer to one another as corresponding substantive 
and adjective. 

A very similar case of substitution of distinctions origin- 
ally accidental for others of formal and organic growth ap- 
pears also in some of our verbs. From delan, ‘ to deal,’ the 
Anglo-Saxon formed, by the usual suffixes of conjugation, 
the imperfect delde and the participle deled. In our 
mouthing over of these forms to suit our ideas of con- 
venient pronunciation, we have established a difference 
of vowel sound among them, saying I déal, but he déalt and 
we have déalt. Here is an internal distinction, of euphonic 


* The plural of 44¢ in Anglo-Saxon is Jéc, as that of fot is fét. 


80 HISTORY OF THE [ LECT, 


origin, accompanying and auxiliary to the external distine- 
tion of conjugational endings. But, among the not in- 
considerable number of verbs exhibiting this secondary 
change of vowel, there are a few, ending in d, in which 
we have elevated it to a primary rank, casting away the 
endings as inconvenient and unnecessary. Thus, where the 
Anglo-Saxon says ledan, ledde, leded, and redan, redde, 
raeded, we say I lead, he léd, we have léd, and I réad, he réad, 
we have r’ad—not even taking the trouble, in the latter 
instance, to vary the spelling to conform to the pronuncia- 
tion. 

Yet another analogous phenomenon has a much higher 
antiquity, wider prevalence, and greater importance, among 
the languages of the Germanic family: it is the change 
of radical vowel in what we usually call the “ irregular ” con- 
Jugation of verbs. The imperfect and participle of sing, for 
example, are distinguished from one another and from the 
present solely by a difference of vowel : thus, sing, sang, sung. 
Other verbs exhibit only a twofold change, their participle 
agreeing with either the present or the imperfect ; thus, 
come, came, come; bind, bound, bound. That this mode of 
conjugation is Germanic only, proves that it arose after the 
separation of the Germanic languages from the greater 
family of which these form a branch. It is, in fact, like the 
other changes of yowel in declension and conjugation which 
we have just been considering, of euphonie origin, and it has 
acquired its present value and significance in comparatively 
modern times: indeed, the English alone has suffered it to 
reach its full development as a means of grammatical ex- 
pression, by generally rejecting all aid from other sources 
than the variation of vowels in distinguishing the verbal 
forms from one another. In the Anglo-Saxon, it still wore 
in great measure a euphonic aspect: that language had its 
Separate affixes for the infinitive and participle; it said 
singan, ‘to sing,’ and sungen, * sung ;’ and its present, ie singe, 
and its preterit, 7c sang, were distinguished in every person 
but one by terminations of different form: the varying scale 
or vowels, then, was only auxiliary to the sense, not essential 
—and it had,and still has, to a considerable extent, the 


rr. | @RMANIC PRETERITS. 81 


same value in the other Germanic dialects, ancient and 
modern. Moreover, there were other frequent changes of 
vowel in verbal conjugation, in other forms than these: the 
second and third persons singular present often differed 
from the first, and in a very large class of verbs the preterit 
plural differed from the singular. Thus, from helpan, ‘ to 
help’, for example, we have ic helpe, ‘I help’; he hylpth, 
‘he helpeth’ ; ze healp, ‘I helped’; we hulpon, ‘ we helped’; 
and finally holpen, ‘ helped’—a fivefold play of vowel change. 
We, in our unconscious endeavour to utilize what was 
practically valuable in this condition of things, and to reject 
the rest from use, have retained and now admit, at most, a 
threefold variation, and have made it directly and independ- 
ently significant, by casting away the needless terminations, 

An interesting illustration of the way in which phonetie 
corruption sometimes creates a necessity for new forms, and 
leads to their production, is to be noted in connection with 
this subject. The Germanic preterits were originally form- 
ed by means of a reduplication, like the Greek and some of 
the Latin perfects;* but the variation of a radical vowel 
had, to no small extent, supplanted it, assuming its office 
and causing its disappearance in the great majority of an- 
cient verbs. Its recognition as the sign of past meaning, 
and its application to the formation of preterits from new 
verbs, were thus broken up and rendered ineffective. At 
the same time, the change of vowel was too irregular and 
seemingly capricious to supply its place in such uses; there 
was no single analogy presented before the minds of the 
language-makers, which could be securely and intelligently 
followed. Hence, for all derivative and denominative verbs 
—additions by which every language is constantly enriching 
its stores of verbal expression—a new kind of past tense 
had to be formed, by composition with the old reduplicated 
preterit did, as has been already explained. This being soon 
converted into a suffix, and the number of preterits formed by 
means of it increasing greatly and rapidly, it became by 
degrees the more common indicator of past action, and was 


* Sce below, lecture vii. p. 268. 
6 


82 OUR POSSESSIVE AND PLURAL ENDINGS. [ LECT. 


recognized as such by the popular apprehension. From 
that time, it began to exhibit a tendency to extend its sphere 
of application at the expense of the more ancient modes of 
forming the preterit tense—the same tendency which shows 
itself so noticeably now in every child who learns the Eng- 
lish language, inclining him to say I bringed, I goed, I seed, 
until with much pains he is taught the various “ irregular” 
forms, and is made to employ them as prevailing usage 
directs. Prevailing usage has in our language already rati- 
fied a host of such blunders; a large portion of the ancient 
(xermanic verbs, formerly inflected after the analogy of sing, 
come, bind, give, and their like, we now conjugate “ regular- 
ly.” One instance we have had occasion to notice above— 
the verb help, of which the ancient participle holpen, instead 
of helped, is still to be found in our English Bibles: others 
are bake, creep, fold, leap, laugh, smoke, starve, wade, wield. 
Further examples of the same tendency toward extension 
of prevailing analogies beyond their historically correct 
imits are to be seen in the present declension of our nouns. 
The letter s is, with us, the sign of all possessive cases, not 
in the singular number alone, but in the plural also of such 
words as do not form their plural in s; thus, man’s, men’s ; 
child’s, children’s. In the Anglo-Saxon, it was the genitive 
ending of the singular only, and by no means in all nouns: 
the feminines, without exception, and many masculines and 
neuters, formed their genitives in other ways. But it was 
the possessive sign in a majority of substantives, and there 
was no other distinctive ending which had the same office ; 
and accordingly, it came to be so associated with the rela- 
tion of possession in the minds of English speakers, that, in 
the great change and simplification of grammatical apparatus 
which attended the transition of Anglo-Saxon into English, 
its use was gradually extended, till at last no exceptions 
were left. A like treatment has given our plural suffix the 
range of application which it now exhibits. Less than half 
the Anglo-Saxon nouns had plurals in s: it was restricted 
to a single gender, the masculine, nor did it even form all 
the masculine plurals; while, in our usage, it is almost uni- 
versal, the only exceptions being the anomalous forms already 


ut. | MOBILIZATION OF NEW WORDS. 83 


referred to (men, mice, feet, etc.), and the few words, like 
oxen from ox, in which we have retained relies of another 
mode of declension, once belonging to a large class of nouns. 
The prevalence which this suffix has attained in our lan- 
guage has been plausibly conjectured to be in part due to 
.the influence of the French-speaking Normans, in whose 
own tongue s was the plural-sign in all nouns, having become 
such by a similar extension of its original Latin use. 

This extensibility of application is a part of the essential 
and indispensable character of a formative element. We 
have not to go over and over again with the primitive act 
of composition and the subsequent reduction, in each separ- 
ate case. It needs only that there be words enough in 
familiar use in a language, in which a certain added element 
distinctly impresses a certain modification of meaning upon 
certain plainly recognizable primitives, and we establish a 
direct association between that element and the given modi- 
fication of meaning, and are ready to apply the former wher- 
ever we wish to signify the latter. The ending ly, for in- 
stance, we use when we want to make an adverb, without 
any thought of whether the adjective like would or would 
not be properly combinable with the word to which we add 
the ending. This alone makes it possible to mobilize, so 
to speak, our linguistic material, to use our old and new 
words in all the circumstances among which they are liable 
to fall. We adopt into our-common speech a new term like 
telegraph ; it was manufactured out of the stores of expres- 
sion of the ancient Greek language, by some man versed in 
that classic tongue, and is implicitly accepted, under the 
sanction and recommendation of the learned, by the public 
at large, who neither know nor care for its etymology, who 
know only that they want a name for a thing, and that this 
answers their purpose. It thus becomes to all intents and 
purposes an English word, a-naturalized citizen in our tongue, 
invested with all the rights and duties of a native—and divest- 
ed, also, of those which belonged to it by hereditary descent, 
among its own kith and kin. We proceed, accordingly, to 
apply to it a whole apparatus of English inflections, long 
eince worked out by the processes of linguistic change, and 

6 * 


84 OBLITERATION® OF [ LECT. 


not yet destroyed by the same processes. We make of it a 
verb, in various forms: he telegraphs, they telegraphed, I shall 
telegraph, we are telegraphing, the art of telegraphing ; other 
nouns come from it, as telegrapher, telegraphist, telegraphy ; 
we can turn it into an adjective, telegraphic ; and this, again, 
into an adverb, telegraphically. Historical congruency is the 
last thing we think of in all this. To a Greek word we add, 
without compunction, endings of wholly diverse descent: 
the greater part are Germanic, coming down to us from the 
Anglo-Saxon ; but one or two, ie, ical, are Latin; and at 
least one, ist, comes ultimately from the Greck. Made up, 
as our English language is, out of two diverse tongues, 
Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, and with more or less in- 
termixture of many others, such a condition of things could 
not be avoided; it is, while practically one homogeneous 
tongue, historically a composite structure, both in vocabulary 
and in grammar. Its grammatical apparatus, its system of 
mobile endings, whereby words may be derived, inflected, 
and varied, is, indeed, in its larger and more essential part 
Germanic ; but it is also in no insignificant measure Latin ; 
while hosts of Latin words receive Germanic endings, not a 
few Germanic words appear invested with Latin and French 
affixes, which have more or legs fully acquired in our use the 
value of formative elements: such are dis-belicf, re-light, for= 
bear-ance, atone-ment, odd-ity, huntr-ess, eat-able, talk-ative.* 
Hitherto we have taken note only of those effects of the 
wearing-out process in language which lead to the substitu- 
tion of one means of expression for another, or which, as in 
the case of grammatical gender, do away with luxuries of 
expression which any tongue can well afford to dispense 
with. But that popular use is not content with abolishing 
distinctions which are wanting in practical value, with giving 
up what is otherwise replaced, or can be spared without loss, 
we shall be fully persuaded, if we merely note what is all 
the time going on around us. The wholly regrettable in- 
accuracies of heedless speakers, their confusion of things 
which ought to be carefully held apart, their obliteration of 


* These examples are taken from Professor Hadley’s “ Brief History of 
the English Lanvnave, ? neofivod to the lotest edition of Webster's Dictionary, 


111. | VALUABLE DISTINCTIONS. 3 


valuable distinctions—all these are part and parcel of the 
ceaseless changes of language, and not essentially different 
from the rest; they are only that part against which the 
best public sentiment, a healthy feeling for the conservation 
of linguistic integrity, arrays itself most strongly, and which 
therefore are either kept down altogether, or come but 
slowly and sparingly to acceptance. Let us note a few in- 
stances of such linguistic degeneration, 

There is in English a long-stauding tendency to efface the 
distinction of form between the imperfect and participle, 
usually assimilating the former to the latter, though not in- 
frequently also the latter to the former. Spoke and broke, 
for spake and brake, held for holden, and many others, are of 
recent acceptance, but now impregnably established; from 
begin, and a considerable class of like verbs, the two forms 
he began and he begun, and so forth, are in nearly equal 
favour ;* he come for he came, I done for I did, and others 
like them, are still blunders and vulgarisms; and we may 
hope that they will always continue such. These alterations 
find support in one of the analogies of the language, which 
has doubtless done much to call them forth. In our regular 
verbs, namely, there is an entire coincidence of form between 
the preterit and participle. The careless speaker reasons— 
not consciously, but in effect—thus: If I say I gained and 
L have gained, I dealt and I have dealt, why not also I sung 
and I have sung, he drank and he has drank, we held and we 
have held, they done and they have done ? 

It is not often, perhaps, that the preterit and participle 
will stand in connections which fail to show distinctly which 
form is meant by the speaker or writer. But we have also 
a few verbs—of which put is a familiar example—in which 
all distinction of present and preterit is likewise lost: if we 
say they put, the general requirements of the sense alone 
can point out the tense, just as if the phrase were so much 
Chinese. 


* This variation is of ancient date, and doubtless founded upon the fact 
that, in many verbs of the class, the vowels were unlike in the singular and 
plural of the preterit: thus, from singan, the Anglo-Saxon has he sang, but 
we 81:NgON. 


RG OBLITERATION OF [LECcT, 


The common confusion of learn and teach, as in “J learnt 
him to swim,” is another case of a somewhat similar charac. 
ter, being also favoured by a recognized usage of our lan- 
guage, which permits us in numerous instances to employ a 
verb in both a simple and a vausative sense. We say correctly 
“the ship ran aground” and “they ran it aground”; why 
not-as well “the boy learned his lesson” and “ they learned 
him his lesson” ? 

A reprehensible popular inaccuracy—commencing in this 
country, I believe, at the South or among the Irish, but 
lately making very alarming progress northward, and through 
almost all classes of the community—is threatening to wipe 
out in the first persons of our futures the distinction between 
the two auxiliaries shall and will, casting away the former, 
and putting the latter in its place. The Southerner Says : 
“It is certain that we will fail,’ “I would try im vain to 
thank you.” To say I shall in circumstances where we 
should say he will, to put we should where good usage would 
require they would, seems to these people, who have never 
investigated either the history or the philosophy of the 
difference of the phraseology in the two persons, an Incon- 
sistency which may and should be avoided. The matter, 
however, is one which implies a violation not only of good 
English usage, but also of sound etymological morality : shall 
originally and properly contains the idea of duty, and wil 
that of resolve ; and to disregard obligation in the laying out 
of future action, making arbitrary resolve the sole guide, is a 
lesson which the community ought not to learn from any 
section or class, in language any more than in political and 
social conduct. 

- Once more, our verb has long been undergoing a process of 
impoverishment by the obliteration of its subjunctive mood. 
This had begun even in the Anglo-Saxon, by the partial loss 
of the distinctive sins of subjunctive meaning, and the 
assimilation of the subjunctive and indicative forms. The 
wearing-off of inflections since that period has nearly finished 
the work, by wiping out, in almost every verb in the language, 
all formal distinction between the two moods, except in the 
second and third persons singular present and the second 


rr. | VALUABLE DISTINCTIONS. 87 


singular preterit: there, it was still possible to say if thou 
bed, of he love, if thou eee instead of thow lovest, he loves, 
thou acdee But the second persons have become of so rare 
use with us that they could render little aid in keeping alive 
in the minds of speakers the apprehension of the subjunctive : 
it virtually rested solely upon the single form if he love. No 
wonder, then, that the distinction, so weakly sustained, be- 
came an evanescent one ; in if they love, if we loved, and so 
on, forms apparently indicative answered sufficiently well the 
purpose of conditional expression ; why not also in the third 
person singular P Under the influence of such considera- 
tions, it has become equally allowable to write if he loves and 
if he love, even in careful and elegant styles of composition, 
while the latter is but very rarely heard in colloquial discourse. 
Only in the verb zo be, whose subjunctive forms were more 
plainly, and in more persons, distinguished from the in- 
dicative, have they maintained themselves more firmly in 
use: to say if Iwas, if he was, for if I were, if he were, is 
even now decidedly careless and inelegant. 

What has been given must suffice as illustration of the 
abbreviation of forms, the mutilation and wearing out of 
formative elements. But this, though a fundamentally and 
conspicuously important part of the phonetic history of a 
language, is only a part: the same tendency, to economize 
the time and labour expended in speaking, to make the 
utterance of words more easy and conyenient, shows itself in 
a great variety of other ways. None of the articulate ele- 
ments of which our vocables are composed are exempt from 
alteration under the operation of this tendency ; while a 
word continues to maintain its general structure and gram- 
matical form, it is hable to change by the conversion of some 
of its sounds into others, by omission, even by addition or in- 
sertion. The subject of phonetic change in language is too 
vast, and runs out into a too infinite detail, to be treated here 
with any fulness: we can only attempt to direct our at- 
tention to its most important features and guiding principles. 

Each one of the sounds composing our spoken alphabet is 
produced by an effort in which the lungs, the throat, and the 
orgaus of the mouth bear a part. The lungs furnish the 


88 PROCESSES OF PRODUCTION - [Lecr, 


rough material, an expulsion of air, in greater or less force ; 
the vocal cords in the larynx, by their approximation and 
vibration, give to this material resonance and tone ; while it 
receives its final form, its articulate character, by the modify- 
ing action of the tongue, palate, and lips. Each articulation 
thus represents a certain position of the shapmg organs of 
the mouth, through which a certain kind and amount of 
material is emitted. A word is composed of a series of such 
articulations, and implies a succession of changes of position 
im the mouth-organs, often accompanied by changes in the 
action of the larynx upon the passing column of air. Thus, 
for example, in the word Jriendly. At first, the tips of 
the upper teeth are pressed upon the edge of the lower lip, 
and simple breath, not intonated in the larynx, is forced out 
between the two organs: the rustimg thus produced is the fz 
sound. The teeth and lips are now released from service, 
and the tip of the tongue is brought near to the roof of the 
mouth at a point a little way behind the gums ; at the same 
instant, the vocal cords are raised and strained, so that the 
escaping air sets them in vibration and becomes sonant ; tone, 
instead of mere breath, is expelled; and the sound of 7 ig 
heard. Next the tongue is moved again; its point is de- 
pressed in the mouth, and its middle raised toward the palate, 
yet not so near but that the sonant breath comes forth freely, 
giving an opener, a more sonorous and continuable tone than 
either of the preceding positions yielded: this we call a 
vowel, short e. Once more the tip of the tongue approaches 
the upper part of the mouth behind the teeth, and this time 
forms a close contact there, cutting off all exit of the breath 
through the oral passage; but the passage of the nose is 
opened for its escape, and we hear the nasal x. To produce 
the next sound, d, the only change needed is the closure of the 
nasal passage ; the mouth and nose being both shut, no emis. 
sion of breath is possible ; yet the tone does not cease; 
breath enough to support for an instant the sonant vibration 
of the vocal cords is forced up into the closed cavity of 
the mouth, behind the tongue: were the vibration and tone 
intermitted during the instant of closure, the sound uttered 
would be a ¢, instead of ad. Before the oral cavity is so full 


1II. | OF ARTICULATE SOUNDS. &9 


that the sonant utterance can be no longer sustained, the 
contact of the tongue with the roof of the mouth is broken 
at its sides, but kept up at its tip, in which position the con- 
tinuance of intonated emission generates an J. iinally, the 
tongue is released at the tip and clevated in the middle, to a 
posture nearly the same with that in which the former vowel 
was spoken, only a little closer, and we have another vowel, 
a short 7. Here, unless some other word immediately follows, 
the process is ended, and inarticulate breathing is commenced 
again. Thus, during tho pronunciation of so brief and 
simple a word, the mouth-organs have been compelled to as- 
sume in succession seven different positions: but all their 
movements have been made with such rapidity and precision, 
one position has followed another so closely and accurately, 
that no intermediate sounds, no slides from one to another, 
have been apprehended by tho ear; it has heard only the 
seven articulations. The action of the throat has varied 
once ; passing without modification the breath expended in 
uttering the f, it has intonated, in one unbroken stream, all 
that followed. The general effort of utterance, too, the 
degree of exertion put forth by the lungs, has not been the 
same throughout: the former part of the word has been ac- 
cented—that is to say, spoken with a fuller and stronger tone 
—with which effect, when not contravened by the emphasis, 
or tone of tie sentence, a slight rise of musical pitch is wont 
to ally itself. And yet once more, we have to note that our | 
word, whether we regard it as seven-fold or as one-fold | 
in respect to the action of the articulating organs, presents 
itself to our apprehension as a two-fold entity: it is dissylabie. 
This property, the foundation of which is in the ear of 
the hearer rather than in the mouth of the speaker, depends 
upon the antithesis of the opener and closer sounds compos- 
ing the word: the comparatively open and resonant vowels 
strike the ear as the prominent and principal constituents of 
the series, while the closer consonants appear as their adjuncts, 
separating at the same time that they connect them. 

This example brings to light the principal elements which 
enter into the structure of spoken signs for ideas, and which 
have to be taken into account in all inquiries into the phoneti¢ 


90 DIFFICULT AND IMPOSSIBLE COMBINATIONS, [LEOT, 


history of language. Each constituent of the spoken alphabet 
requires, in order to its production, a certain kind and 
amount of effort on the part of the various organs concerned 
m articulate utterance. Some of them call for creater 
change from the quiescent condition of the organs, and so are 
in themselves harder to utter, than others,. And again— 
what is of far higher importance in phonology—some are 
much harder to utter than others in connection with one 
another; the changes of position and mode of action of the 
articulating organs which they imply are more difficult of 
production and combination. Thus, it is perfectly practica- 
ble to arrange the sounds composing the word Sriendly in 
such ways as to give very harsh combinations, which, altho ugh 
we may make shift to utter them by a great effort, we should 
ordinarily and properly call unpronounceable : for example, 
nfdrely, lrefdny, yrfdnle. And our word itself, easy as it 
seems to us, would be deemed harsh and unpronounceable by 
many a race and nation of men. It is all a question of 
degree, of the amount of labour to which we are willing to 
subject our articulating organs in speaking. Hosts of series 
of sounds may be made up which, though not unutterable b J 
dint of devoted and vehement exertion, never appear in” 
actual speech, because they are practically too hard; their 
cost is greater than their value; the needs of speech can be 
supphed without resorting to them. And half the languages 
in the world have sounds and combinations of sounds which 
other tongues eschew as being harder than they choose to utter. 
No word that a community has once formed and uttered is in- 
capable of being kept unchanged in their use ; yet use breeds 
change in all the constituents of every language: each sound 
in a word exercises an assimilating influence over the others 
in its neighbourhood, tending to bring them into some other 
form which is more easily uttered in connection with itself 
The seat of “ euphony,” as we somewhat mistakenly term it, 
is in the mouth, not in the ear; words are changed in 
phonetic structure, not according to the impression they 
make upon the organs of hearing, but according to the action 
which they call for in the organs of speaking ; physiological, 
not acoustic relations determine how sounds shall pass inte 
one another in the process of linguistic growth. 


IlI.] PHYSICAL SYSTEM OF ENGLISH SPOKEN SOUNDS. 91 


A spoken alphabet, then, in order to be understood, must 
be arranged upon a physiclogical plan. It is no chaos, but 
an orderly system of articulations, with ties of relationship 
running through it in every direction. It has its natural 
limits, divisions, and lines of arrangement. It is composed 
of series of sounds, produced each in its own part of the 
mouth, by different degrees of approximation of the same 
organs. According to these different degrees of approxima- 
tion, mainly, it is separated into classes: the opener sounds 
we call vowels; the closer, consonants; and, upon the limit 
between the two are sounds—like JZ, 7, 2 in English—which 
are capable of use as either consonants or vowels, The con- 
sonants, again, are subdivided into classes of lesser extent, 
also determined by their correspondence in respect to measure 
of openness, resonance, and continuability: such are the 
semivowels, the nasals, the fricatives (which may be further 
subdivided into sibilants and spirants), and the mutes. And, 
after a certain grade of closeness is reached, each position of 
the mouth-organs gives rise to two distinct sounds, sonant 
and surd, according as intonated or unintonated breath is 
expelled through it. 

The English spoken alphabet, arranged according to this 
method, presents the following scheme:* 


a 
a a 
Soe ae 5 Vowels. 
Sonant Z ¢ 
a Uu 
y Ue l Ww Semivowels. 
n nr m Nasals. 
Surd - h Aspiration. 
Sonant % z ek 
Sibilants. 
Surd $ 8 i tails 
Sonant 5 ) aheier at 
Surd 0 he P L 
Sonant g d b Mees 
Surd k rs 
Palatal Lingual Labial 
Series. Series. Series. 


® For a fuller explanation and establishment of this method of arranges 


92 ORDINARY CONVERSIONS [LEOT. 


The scale of these lectures does not require us to enter 
into a more detailed examination of the organs of speech and 
their product, articulate sounds, or a more exact definition of 
the physical relations of articulate sounds, than has thus been 
given. ‘The principal and most frequent phonetic transitions 
are sufficiently explained by our alphabetic scheme. Let us 
notice a few of them. 

The conversion of a surd letter into its corresponding sonant, 
or of sonant into surd,is abundantly illustrated in the history of 
every language. Our own plural sign, s,is pronounced as s only 
when it follows another surd consonant, as in plants, cakes ; 
after a sonant consonant or a vowel, it becomes z, as in eyes, 
pins, pegs. A like change is common between two vowels, as 
in busy ; the vowel intonation being continued through the 
intervening consonant, instead of intermitted during its utter- 
ance. So, on the other hand, we turn a d into a ¢ after an- 
other surd consonant, where a sonant would be only with 
difficulty pronounced, as in looked (lookt) ; and the German 
eliminates the intonation from all his final mutes, speaking 
kind, kalb, as if they were written kint, kalp. Sounds of the 
same series, but of different classes, easily pass into one an- 
other: thus, the spirants (f, th, and so on) are almost uni- 
versally derived from the full mutes, by a substitution of a 
close approximation (usually accompanied, it is true, by a 
slight shifting of position) for the full mute contact; and they 


ment of the alphabet, see the author’s papers on the Standard Alphabet of Pro- 
fessor Lepsius, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. vii., pp. 
299 —332, and vol. vii., pp. 385—372. The signs used in the scheme 
are those of the Lepsian system. Thus, a represents the sound in far ; a, in 
Jat ; e, in thén and théy; 7, in pin and pigue; a, in whdt and all; o, in 
note ; w, in fill and rile ; e, in bin and barn; 4, the z of azure; 4, the sh 
o 

of shun ; 0, the th of that; 0, the th of thin. The distinction of long and 
short vowels, although it is in every case founded on a difference of quality 
as well as quantity, is here, for convenience’s sake, omitted; as are also the 
diphthongs ai, au, and qi, as in pint, pound, point (of which the two first are 
rather vocal slides than diphthongs). The compound consonants ch and J, in 
church, judge, have also strictly a right to separate representation; since, 
though their final element respectively is ¢ and 4, their initial element is not 
precisely our usual ¢ and d, but one of another quality, more palatal. Were 
ail these differences of utterance noted by separate characters, our written 
<Iphabet would contain forty-two signs, instead of the thirty given above. 


117.] OF SOUNDS INTO ONE ANOTHER. 93 


come especially from such mutes as were originally aspirated— 
that is to say, had an audible bit of an & pronounced after 
them, before the following sound: the way in which they are 
often written, as ph, th, ch (German), is a result and evidence 
of this their origin. A v, too, has in many languages taken 
the place of an earlier semivowel w. Of the transition of ° 
the spirant th into the sibilant s anotable example is offered 
ix. our substitution—now become universal except in anti- 
quated and solemn styles—of he loves for he loveth: s as 
ending of the third person singular of verbs is rare in 
Chaucer, and quite unknown a little earlier. An s between 
vowels, instead of being turned into its own corresponding 
sonant, z, becomes sometimes the next opener sonant of the 
same series, namely 7: this change prevails very extensively 
in many tongues, as the Sanskrit, Latin, Gegmanic ; a familiar 
example of its effect is seen in our were, plural and subjunc- 
tive of was, which has retained the original sibilant. A less 
frequent and regular change puts in place of a letter of one 
series one belonging to the same class but a different series. 
Thus, when the English gave up in pronunciation its palatal 
spirant—still written in so many of our words with gh— 
while it usually simply silenced it, prolonging or strengthen- 
ing, by way of compensation, the preceding vowel, as in light, 
bough, Hugh, 1 sometimes substituted the labial spirant ff as 
in cough, trough ; and, in the latter word, a common popular 
error, doubtless going back to the time of first abandonment 
of the proper gh sound, substitutes the lingual spirant, th, 
pronouncing ¢roth. So the Russians put f for th, turning 
Theodore into Fedor. Exchanges of the mutes of different 
organs with one another are not very seldom met with, 
though not so easy to illustrate with English instances: the 
pent of pentagon and the guing of quinguennial are Greek and 
Latin versions of the same original word, which in our own 
tongue, moreover, has become five. We often hear persons 
who have a constitutional or habitual inaptness to pronounce 
an v7, and who turn it into a w, or an JZ: r and 7, indeed, 
throughout the history of language, are the most interchange- 
able of sounds. Combination of consonants leads with espe- 
cial frequency to the assimilation of the one to the other: 


94 ENGLISH ORTHOGRAPHY. [LuoT, 


our defto is the Latin dictum, ‘said’ ; we say dis-join, but dif- 
fuse; in-different, but am-possible ; ad-dict, but an-nul, ap- 
pend, as-sign, ac-cede, affirm, ag-gress, al-lude, am-munition. 
if the consonants are thus variously liable to pass into one 
another, a yet higher degree of mobility belongs to the vowels. 
It is needless to go into particulars upon this point: the con- 
dition of our own vowel-system is a sufficient illustration of 
it. The letters a, e, 7,0, uv were originally devised and in- 
tended to represent the vowel-sounds in far, prey, pique, pole, 
and rule, respectively, and they still have those values, con- 
stantly or prevailingly, in most of the other languages which 
employ them. But, during the written period of our own 
tongue, the pronunciation of its vowels has undergone—partly 
under the influence of circumstances which are still clearly 
to be pointed out—very sweeping and extensive changes, 
while our words have continued to be spelt nearly as 
formerly ; and the consequence has been a grand dislocation 
of our orthographical system, a divorcement of our written 
from our spoken alphabet. Our written vowels have from 
three to nine values each, and they are supplemented in use 
by a host of digraphs, of equally variable pronunciation ; our 
spoken vowels have each from two to twelve written repre- 
sentatives. All the internal relations of our sounds are 
turned awry ; what we call “ long” and “short” a, or 7, or u, 
or é, or 0, are really no more related to one another ag cor- 
responding long and short, than dog and cat, sun and moon, 
are related to one another as corresponding male and female, 
With our consonants, also, the case is but little better than 
with our vowels: our!words, as we write them, are full of 
silent and ambiguous signs of every class, unremoved ruins 
of an overthrown phonetic structure. And our sense of the 
fitness of things has become so debauched by our training in 
the midst of these vicious surroundings, that it seems to us 
natural and proper that the same sound should be written in 
many different ways, the same sign have many different sounds; 
the great majority of us seriously believe and soberly main- 
tain that a historical is preferable to a phonetic spelling— 
that is to say, that it is better to write our words as we 
imagine that somebody else pronounced them a long time 


IIt.] PHONETIC CHANGH IN PART UNEXPLAINABLE. 95 


since, than as we pronounce them ourselves; and an ortho. 
epical corruption or anomaly, like Ayind for kind, dince for 
dénce, neither for néither, is less frowned on by public 
opinion, and has a better chance for adoption into general 
use, than any, the most obvious, improvement of orthography. 

The illustrations of phonetic change which we have been 
considering concern, as was claimed for them at the outset, 
only the most frequent and easily explainable phenomena of 
their kind, those which are found to prevail more or less in 
almost every known language. But every language has its 
own peculiar history of phonetic development, its special laws 
of mutation, its caprices and idiosyncrasies, which no amount 
of learning and acuteness could enable the phonologist to 
foretell, and of which the full explanation often baffles his 
art. His work is historical, not prescriptive. He has to 
trace out the changes which have actually taken place in the 
spoken structure fi. language, and to discover, so far as he is 
able, their ground, in the physical character and relations of 
the sounds concerned, in the positions and motions of the 
articulating organs by which those sounds are produced. He 
is thus enabled to point out, in the great majority of cases, 
how it is that a certain sound, in this or that situation, should 
be easily and naturally dropped, or converted into such and 
such another sound. But with this, for the most part, he is 
obliged to content himself; his power to explain the motive 
of the change, why it is made i in this word and not in that, 
why by this community and not by that other, is very limited. 
He cannot tell why sounds are found in the alphabet of one 
tongue which are unutterable by the speakers of another; 
why combinations which come without difficulty from the 
organs of one people are utterly eschewed by its neighbour 
and next of kin; why, for example, the Sanskrit will tolerate 
no two consonants at the end of a word, the Greck no con- 
sonant but 2, s, or 7, the Chinese none but a nasal, the Italian 
none at all: why the Polynesian will form no syllable which 
does not end with a vowel, or which begins with more than une 
consonant, while the English will bear as many as six or seven 
consonants about asingle vowel (as in splints, strands, twelfths) ; 
why the accent in a Latin word has its place always deter- 
mined by the quantity of the syllable before the last, and resta 


a 


26 PHONETIC CHANGE IN PART UNEXPLAINABLE. [ LECT. 


either upon that syllable or the one that precedes it, while in 
Greek it may be given to either of the last three syllables, and 
is only partially regulated by quantity ; why, again, the Irish 
and Bohemian lay the stress of voice invariably upon the first 
syllable of a word, and their near relations, the Welsh and 
Polish, as invariably upon the penult; others still, like the 
Russian and Sanskrit, submitting it to no restriction of place 
whatever, These, and the thousand other no$ less striking 
differences of phonetic structure and custom which might 
readily be pointed out, are national traits, results of differences 
of physical organization so subtile (af they exist at all), of in- 
fluences of circumstance so recondite, of choice and habit so 
arbitrary and capricious, that they will never cease to elude 
the search of the investigator. But he will not, in his per- 
plexity, think of ascribing even the most obscure and startling 
changes of sound to any other agency than that which brings 
about those contractions and conversions which are most 
obviously a relief to the organs of articulation: it is still the 
speakers of language, and they alone, who work over and 
elaborate the words they utter, suiting them to their con. 
venience and their caprice. The final reason to which we 
are brought in every case, when historical and physical study 
have done their utmost, is but this: it hath pleased the com- 
munity which used this word to make such an alteration in its 
form; and such and such considerations and analogies show 
the change to be one neither isolated nor mysterious. 
Except in single and exceptional cases, there is no such dif. 
ference of structure in, human mouths and throats that any 
human being, of whatever race, may not perfectly master the 
pronunciation of any human language, belonging to whatever 
other race—provided only his teaching begin early enough, 
before his organs have acquired by habit special capacities 
and incapacities. The collective disposition and ability of a 
community, working itself out under the guidance of circum- 
stances, determines the phonetic form which the common 
tongue of the community shall wear. And as, In the first 
essays of any child at speaking, we may note not only natural 
errors and ready substitutions of one sound for another, com- 
mcn to nearly all children, but also one and another peculiar 
conversion, which seems the effect of mere whim, explainabie 


ut. GRIMM’S LAW. 97 


by nothing but individual caprice, so in the traditional trans- 
mission of language—which is but the same process of teach- 
ing children to speak, carried out upon a larger scale—we 
must look for similar cases of arbitrary phonetic transitions. 

So important a part of the history of a language are its 
special methods of phonetic change, that, in investigating the 
relations of any dialect with its kindred dialects, the first step 
is to determine to what sounds in the latter its own sounds 
regularly correspond. Thus, on comparing English and 
German, we find that a d in the former usually agrees, not 
with a d, but witha ¢, in the latter; as is shown by dance and 
tanz, day and tag, deep and tief, drink and trink, and so on. 
In lke manner, the German counterpart of an English ¢ is s 
or 2: compare foot and fuss, tin and zinn, to and zu, two and 
zwei, and the like; and a German d answers to our ¢f, as in 
die for the, dein for thine, bad for bath. What is yet more 
extraordinary is the fact that, if we compare English with the 
older languages of our family—as with Latin, Greek, and 
Sanskrit—we discover the precise converse of this relation : 
as German ¢ is English d, so English é is Latin d (compare 
two and duo); as German d is English ¢h, so English d is 
Greek th (compare door and thura, daughter and thugatér) ; 
as German s orz is English ¢, so English th (the lisped letter 
instead of the hissed, the spirant for the sibilant) is Latin, 
Greek, and Sanskrit ¢ (compare three and tres, treis, tri; 
that and -tud, to, tad). In short, taking the series of three 
dental mutes, surd, aspirate, and sonant, ¢, th, and d, we find 
that the Germanic languages in general, including the Eng- 
lish, have pushed each of them forward one step, while the 
High-German dialects, chiefly represented by the literary 
German, have pushed each of them forward two sieps. 
Thus, in tabular form : 


bis ot S. tad (3), 

2. th KE. that (1), Gr. thura, 

3. d G. das (2). E. door, L. dent-em (1), 
ee Gacttn™. E. tooth (2), 
ze th G. zand* (3). 


* T give here the Old Tligh-German forms, as illustrating the change more 
distinctly and fully than the corresponding modern German words. 


98 GRIMM’S LAW. [ LECT. 


And a similar rule of permutation holds good also among the 
consonants of the two other series, the palatal and labial: &, 
kh, 9; p, ph, b—the whole, with certain variations and ex- 
ceptions, of which we do not need here to take account. This 
intricate method of correspondence without identity is gene- 
rally styled, after its discoverer, “ Grimm’s Law of Permuta- 
tion of Consonants ;”* it isa fact of prime consequence in 
the history of the group of languages to which ours belongs, 
and, at the same time, one of the most remarkable and difh- 
cult phenomena of its class which the linguistic student finds 
anywhere offered him for explanation. Nor has any satis- 
factory explanation of it been yet devised ; while, nevertheless, 
we have no reason to believe it of a nature essentially dif- 
ferent from other mutations of sound, of equally arbitrary 
appearance, though of less complication and less range, 
which. the history of language everywhere exhibits. The 
Armenian, for example, has converted its ancient surd mutes 
prevailingly into sonants, and its sonants into surds; the 
cockney drops his initial 4’s, and aspirates his initial. 
vowels: neither of these, any more than the permutation of 
consonants in the Germanic languages, 1s referable to a tend- 
ency toward ease of utterance, in any of its ordinary modes 
of action ; yet no sound linguist would think of doubting that 
all the three phenomena are alike historical in their nature, 
results of the working out of tendencies which existed and 
operated in the minds of those who spoke the several lan- 
guages in which they have made their appearance. 

We need give but a moment’s attention to another pro- 
cess of linguistic change, whereby not letters, parts of words, 
formative elements, alone are lost, but whole words, signs of 
ideas, disappear from among the stores of expression of a 
language. This, too, is always and everywhere going on. 
Evidence of it is to be seen in the obsolete and obsolescent 
material found recorded on almost every page of our diction- 
aries, and still more abundantly in the monuments of our 
literature, of periods to which our dictionaries do not pre 
tend to go back, among the works of the earliest English 
writers; and, above all, in the Anglo-Saxon literature. As 

* In German, simply the Lautverschiebung 


111. | LOSS OF WORDS FROM USE. 99 


new thought and knowledge calls for new words and phrases, 
in order to its expression, so, when old thought and know- 
ledge becomes antiquated, is superseded, and loses its cur- 
rency, the words and phrases which expressed it, unless con- 
verted to other purposes, must also go out of use. It is 
sufficient that any constituent of language come to appear 
to those who have been accustomed to use it unnecessary 
and superfluous, and they cease to employ and transmit it ; 
and, as tradition and use are the only means by which the 
life of language is kept up, it drops out of existence and 
disappears for ever—unless, indeed, it be maintained in arti- 
ficial life by the preservation of records of the dialect in 
which it figured, or its mummy, with due account of its his- 
tory and departed worth, be deposited, labelled “ obsolete,” 
in a dictionary. In part, things themselves pass out of 
notice and remembrance, and their names along with them; 
in part, new expressions arise, win their way to popular 
favour, and crowd out their predecessors ; or, of two or more 
nearly synonymous words, one acquires a special and exclu- 
sive currency, and assumes the office of them all; in part, 
too, even valuable items of expression fall into desuetude, 
from no assignable cause save the carelessness or caprice of 
the language-users, and pass away, leaving a felt void behind 
them. Of course, those departments of a vocabulary which 
are lable to most extensive and rapid change by expansion 
are also most exposed to loss of their former substance, 
since the growth of human knowledge consists not merely in 
addition, but also in the supersession and replacement of old 
ideas by new: the technical phraseology of the arts, sciences, 
and handicrafts shows most obsolete words, as it shows most 
new words; yet, in the never-ending adjustment of human 
speech to human circumstances and needs, every part is in 
its own degree affected by this kind of change, as well as b 

the others. Rarely has any cultivated tongue, during a like 
period of its history, given up more of its ancient material 
than did the English during the few centuries which succeed- 
ed the Norman invasion; a large portion of the Aunglo- 
Saxon vocabulary was abandoned; but this was only the 


natural effect of the intrusion of so many Norman-French 
7% 


100 CHANGES OF SIGNIFICANT [LEcT. 


words, an enrichment beyond all due measure, rendering 
necessary the relinquishment of some part of resources which 
exceeded the wants of the community. If, upon the whole, 
we have gained by the exchange, it has not been without 
some regrettable losses, of the significant as well as of the 
formative elements of expression. 

" The processes which we have thus examined and illustrated 
—on the one hand, the production of new words and forms 
by the combination of old materials ; on the other hand, the 
wearing down, wearing out, and abandonment of the words 
and forms thus produced, their fusion and mutilation, their 
destruction and oblivion—are the means by which are kept 
up the life and growth of language, so far as concerns its 
external shape and substance, its sensible body: by their 
joint and mutual action, greatly varying in rate and kind 
among different peoples, at different times, and under differ- 
ent circumstances, spoken tongues have been from the be- 
ginning of their history, and are still, everywhere becoming 
other than they were. Yet they together constitute but one 
department of linguistic change; another, affecting the in- 
ternal content of language, the meaning of its words, equally 
demands notice from us. To this we have not yet distinctly 
directed our attention, although our illustrations have neces- 
sarily set forth, to a certain extent, its action and effects, 
along with those of the external modifications which we have 
been especially considering. It is a part of linguistic his- 
tory which, to say the least, possesses not less interest and 
importance than the other. To trace out the changes of 
signification which a word has undergone is quite as essen- 
tial a part of the etymologist’s work as to follow back its 
changes of phonetic form ; and the former are yet more rich 
in striking and unexpected developments, more full of in- 
struction, than the latter: upon them depend in no small 
measure the historical results which the student of language 
aims at establishing. It may even be claimed with a certain 
justice that change and development of meaning constitute 
the real interior life of language, to which the other pro- 
cesses only furnish an outward support. In their details, 
indeed, the outer and inner growth are to a great extent in. 


ur | CONTENT OF WORDS. 101 


dependent of one another: a word may suffer modification 
of form in any degree even to the loss or mutation of every 
phonetic element it once contained, with no appreciable 
alteration of meaning (as in our I for Anglo-Saxon zc, eye 
for eage) ; and, again, it may be used to convey a totally 
different meaning from that which it formerly bore, while 
still maintaining its old form. Yet, upon the whole, the two 
must correspond, and answer one another’s uses. That 
would be but an imperfect and awkward language, all whose 
expansion of significant content was made without aid from 
the processes which generate new words and forms; and the 
highest value of external change lies in its facilitation of in- 
ternal, in its office of providing signs for new ideas, of ex- 
panding a vocabulary and grammatical system into a more 
complete adaptedness to their required uses. But change 
of meaning is a more fundamental and essential part of lin- 
guistic growth than change of form. If, while words grew 
together, became fused, integrated, abbreviated, their signi- 
fication were incapable of variation, no phonetic plasticity 
could make of language aught but a stiff dead structure, in- 
capable of continuously supplying the wants of a learning 
and reasoning people. If for every distinct conception lan- 
guage were compelled to provide a distinct term, if every 
new idea or modification of an idea called imperatively for a 
new word or a modification of an old one, the task of lan- 
guage-making would be indefinitely increased in difficulty. 
The case, however, is far otherwise. A wonderful facility of 
putting old material to new uses stands us in stead in deal- 
ing with the intent as well as the form of our words. The 
ideal content of speech is even more yielding than is its ex- 
ternal audible substance to the touch of the moulding and 
shaping mind. In any sentence that may be chosen, as we 
shall find that not one of the words is uttered in the same 
manner as when it was first generated, so we shall also find 
that not one has the same meaning which belonged to it at 
the beginning. The phonctists claim, with truth, that any 
given articulated sound may, in the history of speech, pass 
over into any other; the same may with equal truth be 
claimed of the ideas signified by words: there can hardly be 


102 WHY WORDS MAY CHANGE THEIR MEANING. [LECT 


two so disconnected and unlike that they may not derive 
themselves historically, through a succession of intermediate 
steps, from one another or from the same original. The 
varieties of significant change are as infinite as those of pho- 
netic change ; and, as in ‘dealing with the latter, so here 
again, we must lina ourselves to ‘pointing out and exempli- 
fying the leading principles and more prominent general 
methods. 

The fundamental fact which makes ae to be of change- 
able meaning is the same to which we have already had to 
refer as making them of changeable form: namely, that there 
is no internal and necessary connecticn between a word and 
the idea designated by it, that no tie save a mental associa- 
tion binds the two together. Conventional usage, the mu- 
tual understanding of speakers and hearers, allots to each 
vocable its significance, and the same authority which makes 
is able to change, and to change as it will, in whatever way, 
and to whatever extent. The only limit to the power of 
change is that imposed by the necessity of mutual intelli- 
gibility ; no word may ever by any one act be so altered as to 
lose its identity as a sign, becoming unrecognizable by those 
who have been accustomed to employ it. Hle’mosuné is re- 
ducible to a’ms, but only through a series of intermediate 
stages, of which the German almosen, the Anglo-Saxon almes, 
and our spelling alms are representatives ; the change of sir 
nificant content which it has at the same time undergone, 
from ‘feeling of pity or compassion’ to one of the practical 
results of such a feeling, is comparatively inconsiderable, not 
‘more than we are in the constant habit of making at a single 
step. Our corresponding word of Latin derivation, charity, 
while little altered in form from its original, caritas, ‘ dear- 
ness,’ has suffered a much more distant transfer of significa. 
tion. Priest, again, from the Greek presbiiteros, ‘ an older per- 
son,’ has wandered from its primitive to about equal distance 
in form and in meaning; the one departure taking place 
under physical inducements, brought about by an impulse 
to economize physical effort on the part of those who had to 
utter the word; the other accompanying a historical change 
in the character and functions of an official originally choser 


7 


ut.] PROCESSES OF NAMES-GIVING. 108 


simply as a person of superior age and experience to oversee 
the concerns of a Christian community. These are but or- 
dinary examples of the indefinite mutability of words, such as 
might be culled out of every sentence which we speak. Let 
us ieok at one or two further instances, which go back to a 
remoter period in the history of speech, and illustrate more 
fully the normal processes of word-making. 

The word moon, with which are akin “the names for the 
same object in many of the languages connected w ith our 
own, comes from a root (mda) signifying ‘to measure’, and, 
by its etymology, means ‘the measurer’. It is plainly the 
fact—and one of some interest, as indicating the ways of 
thinking of our remote ancestors—that the moon was looked 
upon as in a peculiar sense the measurer of time: and, in- 
deed, we know that primitive nations generally have begun 
reckoning time by moons or months before arriving at a 
distinct apprehension of the year, as an equally natural and 
more important period. By an exception, the Latin nameg 
luna (abbreviated from lwe-na) means ‘the shining one.’ In 
both these cases alike, we have an arbitrary restriction and 
special application to a single object of a term properly bear- 
ing a general sense; and also, an arbitrary selection of a 
single quality in a thing of complex nature to be made a 
ground of designation for the whole thing. In the world of 
created objects. there are a great many  measurers” , and a 
ereat many “shining ones’; there are also a great many 
other qualities belonging to the earth’s satellite, which have 
just as good a right as these two to be noticed in her name: 
yet the appellation perfectly answers its purpose; no one, 
for thousands of years, has inquired, save as a matter of 
learned curiosity, what, after all, the word moon properly 
signifies: for us 1t designates our moon, and we may observe 
and study that luminary to the end of time without feeling 
that our increased knowledge furnishes any reason for our 
changing its name. The words for ‘sun’ have nearly the 
same history, generally designating it as ‘the brilliant or 
shining one’, or as ‘the enlivener, quickener, generator’. 
There are hardly two other objects within the ordinary 
range of human observation more essentially unique than 


104 PROCESSES OF NAMES-GIVING. [ LECT, 


the sun and the moon, and their titles were, as nearly as is 
possible in language, proper names. But such they could 
not continue to be. No constituent of language is the ap- 
pellation of an individual existence or act; each designates 
a class; and, even when circumstances scem to lmit the 
class to one member, we are ever on the watch to extend its 
bounds. The same tendency which, as already pointed out, 
leads the child, when it has learned the words papa and sky, to 
take the things designated by those words as types of classes, 
and so—rightly enough in principle, though wrongly as re- 
gards the customary use of language—to call other men 
papa, and to call the ceiling sky, 1s always active in us. 
Copernicus having taught us that the sun is the great centre 
of our system, that the earth is not the point about which 
and for which the rest of the universe was created, the 
thought is at once suggested to us that the fixed stars also 
may be centres of systems lke our own, and we call them 
suns. And no sooner does Galileo discover for us the lesser 
orbs which circle about J upiter and others of our sister- 
planets, than, without a scruple, or a suspicion that we are 
doing anything unusual or illegitimate, we style them moons. 
Each word, too, hag its series of figurative and secondary 
meanings. “So many suns”, “so many moons”’, signify the 
time marked by so many revolutions of the two luminaries 
respectively ; in some languages the word moon itself (as in 
the Greek mén), in others, a derivative from it (as the Latin 
mensis and our month), comes to be the usual name of the 
period determined by the wax and wane of our satellite— 
and is then transferred to designate those fixed and arbitrary 
subdivisions of the solar year to which the natural system of 
lunar months has so generally been compelled to give place. 
By a figure of another kind, we sometimes call by the name 
sum one who is conspicuous for brillianey and influence: 
“made glorious summer by this sun of York.” By yet an- 
other, but which has now long lost its character as a figure, 
and become plain and homely speech, we put sun for sunlight, 
saying, “to walk out of the sun”, “to bask in the sun”, and 
so on. In more learned and technical phrase, the Latin 
name of the moon, lwne, or its diminutive, Zwnette, is made 


ni. | PROCESSES OF NAMES-GIVING. 105 


the designation of various objects having a shape roughly re- 
sembling some one of the moon’s varying phases. A popular 
superstition connects with these last some of the phenomena 
of insanity, and so the same word lune has to signify also ‘a 
crazy fit’, while a host of derivatives—as lunatic, lunacy ; as 
moon-struck, mooning, mooner—attest in our common speech 
the intuence of the same delusion. 

This elasticity of verbal signiticance, this indefinite con- 
tractibility and extensibility of the meaning of words, is 
capable of the most varied illustration. Among all the 
various workmen who take rough materials and make them 
supple or smooth, the arbitrary choice of our Germanic 
ancestors, ages ago, designated the worker in metal as the 
one who should be styled the smith. Ata much later period, 
when the convenience of a more developed social condition 
created a demand for surnames, certain individuals of this 
respectabie profession took from it the cognomen of Smith. 
Then, just as the name smith had been divorced from its con- 
nection with the more general idea of smooth, and restricted 
to a certain class of smoothers, so now, the name Smith was 
cut loose from the profession, and limited to these particular 
individuals and their belongings. Yet, as such, it became 
the nucleus of a new class-extension, in which the tie of con- 
sanguinity was substituted for that of common occupation ; 
and, although all smiths are not Smiths, the Smiths are 
now even more numerous than the smiths. Every proper 
name, not less than every common noun, goes back thus to an 
individual appellation, having a historical ground, and is 
determined in its farther application by historical cireum- 
stances. Thus, to take a more dignified example, the first 
Cesar was so styled from some fact in his life—the authori- 
ties are at issue from what particular one: whether from his 
unnatural mode of birth (@ caso matris utero), or from his 
coming into the world with long hair (cesaries), or from his 
slaying a Mauritanian elephant (cesar in Mauritanian 
speech). His descendants then inherited from him the same 
name, without having to show the same reason for it; and 
the preéminent greatness and power of one among them 
made it a part of the permanent title of him who ruled the 


106 UHANGES OF SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDs. [ LECT, 


Roman state, of whatever race he might be; while frem here 
it not only passed to the emperor (kaiser) of Germany, 
whose throne pretends to be the modern representative of 
that of Rome, but also to the autocrat (czar) of distant and 
barbarous Russia—thus becoming the equivalent of ‘emperor’ 
in two of the most important languages of modern Europe. 

These examples are of themselves sufficient to place before 
our eyes the most important features in the history of signi- 
ficant change of words, the principal processes by which— 
even apart from combination or phonetic change, but yet 
more effectively in connection with these—the existing 
vocabulary of a language is adaptable to the growing know- 
tedge and varying needs of those who use it. We see that, 
in finding a name by which to designate a new conception, 
we may either pitch upon some one of the latter’s attributes, 
inherent or accidental, and denominate it from that, limiting 
and specializing for its use an attributive term of a more 
general meaning; or, on the other hand, we may connect it 
by a tie of correspondence or analogy with some other con- 
ception already named, and extend so as to include it the 
sphere of application of the other’s designation; while, in 
either case, we may improve or modify to any extent our ap- 
prehension of the object conceived of, both stripping it of 
qualities with which we had once invested it and attributing 
to it others, and may thus pave the way to the establishment 
of new relations between it and other objects, which shall be- 
come fruitful of further changes in our nomenclature. These 
two, in fact—the restriction and specialization of general 
terms, and the extension and generalization of special terms 
—are the two grand divisions under which may be arranged 
all the infinite varieties of the process of names-giving. 
Some of these varieties and their effects, however, it will be 
desirable for us to examine and illustrate more fully, before 
going on to consider farther the general character of the 
process. We will not attempt in our illustrations a strictly 
systematic method, but will take something of the same free- 
dom which linguistic usage assumes in dealing with the 
material of speech. 

It is obvious how vastly the resources of a language for 


ri. | VARIETY OF MEANINGS OF A WORD. 107 


‘the expression of thought are increased by attribution to the 
same word of different meanings. Not only does a term ex- 
change one well-defined meaning for another, but it acquires 
new uses while yet retaining those it formerly possessed. 
For example, board appears to be originally connected with 
broad, and to designate etymologically that form of. timber 
which is especially characterized by breadth rather than 
thickness. Here we have the customary and normal gene- 
sis of the name of a specific thing, by restriction of a general 
term expressing one of its attributes. Then follow yet other 
individualizations and transfers. The word is applied to de- 
signate a table: on the one hand, the table upon which our 
food is spread, and we sit around the festive board ; whence, 
then, a metaphor makes it mean provision or entertainment; 
and we seek bed and board, or work for our board: on the 
other hand, the table about which a body of men sit for the 
transaction of business, and so, by another metaphor, those 
who sit about it, a constituted body of trustees or commis- 
sioners, the Board of Trade, or of Commerce, or of Admiralty. 
Again, it is specifically used to denote the plank covering of 
a vessel, and generates in this sense a new group of phrases, 
like aboard and overboard, The paper-maker, too, has his tech- 
nical uses for the term; to him it signifies the stiffest and 
thickest, the most board-like, of his fabrics. Post (Latin 
positum, from pono, ‘I place’) means by derivation nothing 
more than ‘ put, placed, stationed’ ; all its varied and diverse 
senses—so diverse that we can not only say “as immovable as 
a post”, but also “to travel post-haste”»—-we developed out 
of this, along with the historical growth of human institu- 
tions.. The establishment of a series of stations, posts, for 
the trusty and rapid transmission of passengers and mails 
along a road, leads finally to the familiar use of such terms 
as post-coach, post-master, and postage. What a cluster of 
derived uses is gathered about the word head, as illustrated 
in the phrases the head of a pin, a head of cabbage, the head 
of a bed, the head of a household or of a sect, the head of a 
river, the heads of a discourse, a head of hair, so many head 
of sheep, of one’s own head, to come to a head, to make head} 
Half the whole list of figures of rhetoric are exemplified in 


108 DIVERGENCE OF MEANINGS OF A WORD. [ LECT. 


the history of this one word. In court, the secondary signi- 
fications have almost effaced the primitive, and, to be clear, 
we say rather the court-yard than the court of a castle; but 
2 nobleman of the court, a case in court, the court instructs 
the jury, to pay court; and the derivative words courtly, 
courteous, a courtesy, courtship, courtier, courtesan, all coming 
from one of the specific applications of court, tell us of the 
manners of those who walk in kings’ houses. 

Not seldom, the proper meaning of a word is altogether 
lost, and it diverges into others so unlike that the common 
apprehension is unable to connect-them by any tie. Become 
contains come, but not éo be, although we may often render it 


by ‘come to be’. Its be is the same with that of befall, beset, 


bemoan, a prefix giving a transitive meaning to an intransitive 
verb : to become is originally ‘to come upon, to come by, te 
obtain, to get’. The transfer of meaning, from ‘obtain’ to 
‘come to be’, is a somewhat peculiar one; but that it is 
natural enough is shown by the fact that we have gone on to 
treat in the same way the equivalent verb ¢o get, sayiig he 
gets tired for he becomes tired, and so on. From the same 
primitive sense of ‘come upon’, we have taken a step 10 
another direction to ‘ sit well upon, be adapted to, suit’, ay 
when we say “such conduct does not become one in high 
station”. To trace the relation between these two meanings 
of become is out of the power cf most of those who use them ; 
even the dictionaries enter them as two separate words. Not 
much less‘ difficult is the connection of hind, ‘well-disposed, 
friendly ’, with kind, ‘a sort or species’; or of like, ‘to be 
fond of’, with like, ‘resembling ’—although both are but a 
working out, in the minds of the language-makers, of the 
thought “a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind”: the 
idea of kindred or resemblance leading naturally to that of 
consideration and affection. So, once more, how second, ‘ the 
sixtieth of a minute’, and second as ordinal of two, come to 
be the same word, would be a puzzle for most English 
speakers : the fact that seconds constitute the second order in 
the sexagesimal subdivision of the hour and of the degree 
being by no means a conspicuous one; and the act which 
stamped this particular secend order of Civision with the name 


III. | AMBISUITY AND PRECISION OF MEANING. 109 


second being not less arbitrary than that which applied the 
same term—coming, as it does, from sequor, ‘I follow’, and 
so signifying only ‘ the one next following ’—to designate the 
ordinal which succeeded the first, rather than any other of 
the series. 

But it is needless to multiply illustrations of this point ; 
every one knows that it 1s the usual and normal character of 
a word to bear a variety, more or less considerable, of mean- 
ings and applications, which often diverge so widely, and are 
connected so loosely, that the lexicographer’s art is severely 
taxed to trace out the tie that runs through them, and exhibit 
them in their natural order of development. Hardly a term 
that we employ is not partially ambiguous, covering, not a 
point, but a somewhat extended and irregular territory of 
significance ; so that, in understanding what is said to us, we 
have to select, under the guidance of the context, or general 
requirement of the sense, the particular meaning intended. 
To repeat a simile already once made use of, each word is, 
as it were, a stroke of the pencil in an outline sketch; the 
ensemble is necessary to the correct interpretation of each. 
The art of clear speaking or writing consists in so making up 
the picture that the right meaning is surely suggested for 
each part, and directly suggested, without requiring any 
conscious process of deliberation and choice. The general 
ambiguity of speech is contended against and sought to be 
overcome in the technical vocabulary of every art and science: 
in chemistry, for instance, in mineralogy, in botany, by the 
observation of minor differences, even back to the ultimate 
atomic constitution of things, and by the multiplication and 
nice distinction of terms, the classes under which common 
speech groups together the objects of common life are broken 
up, and each substance and quality is noted by a name which 
designates it, and it alone. Mental philosophy attempts the 
same thing with regard to the processes and cognitions of the 
mind; but since, in matters of subjective apprehension, it is im- 
practicable to bring the meaning of words to a definite and 
unmistakable test, the difficulty of distinctly denominating 
one’s ideas, of defining terms, amounts to an impossibility ; no 
two schools of metaphysics, no two teachers even, agree pres 


1i0 SYNONYMS. [ LECT. 


cisely in their phraseology ; nor can any one’s doctrine upon 
recondite points be fully understood save by those who have 
studied longest and most thorouglily the entirety of his sys- 
tem—nor always even by them. 

As the significant changes of language thus bring the same 
word to the office of designating things widely different, so 
they also bring different words to the office of designating the 
same or nearly the same thing. Thus the resources of ex- 
pression are enriched in another way, by the production of 
Synonyms, names partly accordant, partly otherwise, dis- 
tinguishing different shades and aspects of the same gener- 
al idea. I will refer to but a single instance. The feeling of 
shrinking anticipation of imminent danger, in its most gener- 
al manifestation, is called fear: but for various degrees and 
manifestations of fear we have also the names Sright, terror, 
dread, alarm, apprehension, pame, tremor, timidity, fearfulness, 
and perhaps others. Each of these has its own relations and 
associations ; there is hardly a case where any one of them is 
employed that one or other of the rest might not be put in 
its place; and yet, there are also situations where only one 
of them is the best term to use—though the selection can 
only be made, or appreciated when made, by those who are 
nicest in their treatment of language, and though no one who 
does not possess unusual acuteness and critical Judgment can 
duly describe and illustrate the special significance of each 
term. We are not to suppose, however, that our synonymy 
covers all the distinctions, in this or in any other case, that 
might be drawn, and drawn advantageously. On learning 
another language, we, may find in its vocabulary a richer 
store of expressions for the varieties of this emotion, or a 
notation of certain forms of it which we do not heed. 
Hardly any word in one tongue precisely fills the domain 
appropriated to the word most nearly corresponding with it 
in another, so that the former may be invariably translated 
by the latter. The same territory of significance is differ- 
ently parcelled out in different tongues among the designa- 
tions which occupy it; nor is it ever completely covered by 
them all. The varying shades of Jvar are practically in- 
finite, depending on differences of constitutional impressi- 


111. ] VARIOUS FORMS OF THE SAME WORD. 11f 


bility to such a feeling, on differences of character and habit 
which would make it lead to different action. Hence the 
impossibility that one should ever apprehend with absolute 
truth what another, even with the nicest use of language, 
endeavours to communicate to him. This incapacity of speech 
to reveal all that the mind contains meets us at every point. 
The soul of each man is a mystery which no other man can 
fathom: the most perfect system of signs, the most richly 
developed language, leads only to a partial comprehension, 
a mutual intelligence whose degree of completeness de- 
pends upon the nature of the subject treated, and the ac- 
quaintance of the hearer with the mental and moral character 
of the speaker. 

Tt not infrequently happens that a variation of phonetic 
form comes in to aid the variation of significant content of 
a word. That mindte portion of time of which sixty make 
an hour we call minute (min-it). Of and eff are but differ- 
ent English forms of the same Anglo-Saxon word, the latter 
retaining the full significance of the ancient preposition, the 
former having acquired a greatly attenuated and extended 
sense. Can is a variety of ken, ‘to know,’ and means 
etymologically ‘to know how;’ the language-makers had 
observed that “ knowledge is power” long before it occurred 
to Lord Bacon to make the remark. Worked and wrought, 
owned, owed, and ought, are identical in all their constituent 
elements, however differently understodd and employed by 
us. A yet more notable diversity, both of form and mean- 
ing, has been established between also and as. Gentle, gen- 
teel, and gentile all go back to the Latin gentilis, which 
means simply ‘pertaining to a gens or race. So with legal, 
loyal, and leal, so with fragile and frail, with secure and sure 
—of which the former come more directly from the Latin, 
the other from the corrupted French forms. So, too, with 
maneuvre and manure, corps and corpse, think and thank, 
and a host of other words which might readily be adduced. 

Among the examples already given, not a few have illus- 
trated the transfer of a word from a physical to a spirit-sal 
significance. This method of change is one of such pro- 
minent importance in the development of language that it 


112 DERIVATION OF SPIRITUAL TLEOT, 


requires at our hands a more special treatment. By it has 
been generated the whole body of our intellectual, moral, 
and abstract vocabulary ; every word and phrase of which 
this is composed, if we are able to trace its history back to 
the beginning, can be shown to have signified originally 
something concrete and apprehensible by the senses: its 
present use is the result of a figurative transfer, founded 
on the recognition of an analogy between a physical and a 
mental act or product. Let us look, for example, at a few 
of the terms which we have just been using. Abstract is 
‘drawn off, dragged away ;’ concrete is ‘grown together, 
compacted,’ into something substantial, as we say; that is, 
something that ‘stands beneath,’ constitutes a foundation. 
Spirit is ‘breath.’ Intellect comes from a verb signifying 
‘to gather or select among, to choose between.’ Apprehend 
signifies literally ‘to lay hold of” and we still use it in that 
sense, as when we say that the officer apprehends the felon; 
but we much more often apply it to the laying hold, the 
seizing or catching, of something set before our minds to be 
received; and we even speak of an apprehended calamity, 
as if our anticipations reached out and laid hold upon that 
which has not yet come, and may never come, upon us. 
Sympathy is good Greek for ‘companionship in suffering ;’ 
but if we say that two wounded men on neighbouring pallets 
sympathize, we refer, not to their physical distress, but to 
that unselfish emotional pain with which every noble heart, 
forgetting so far its own griefs, is touched at the sight of 
another's. To possess is ‘to sit by, to beset’ (like the Ger- 
man equivalent, besiizen). When we employ the phrase “I. 
propose to discuss an important subject,” of what a medley 
of metaphors should we be guilty, if we had not forgotten 
the etymological meaning of the terms we use! To propose 
is ‘to set in front’ of us; to discuss is ‘to shake to pieces ;’ 
a subject is a thing ‘ thrown under,’ something brought under 
our notice; important means ‘carrying within ’—that is, 
having a content, not empty or valueless. 

This subject admits of easiest and most abundant illustra. 
tion from the Latin side of our language, because so large a 
share of our abstract phraseology comes to us from Latin 


111. | FROM PHYSICAL TERMS. 133 


sources; yet our Germanic words are full of the same kind 
of meaning. One of our commonest intellectual terms, 
wnderstand, is also one presenting an exceptionally bold and 
difficult figure: as if to ‘stand beneath’ (or perhaps, accord- 
ing to the older meaning of under, to ‘stand in the midst 
of’) a thing were to take such a position of advantage with 
regard to it that it could not help disclosing to us its secrets. 
Forget is the opposite of get, and means to ‘fail to get,’ or, 
having gotten, to lose again from possession. In this latter 
sense the language seizes upon it, but arbitrarily restricts its 
application to a mental possession, and makes the compound 
signify ‘to lose from memory’ only. I get my lesson, and 
forget it again ; but the fortune I had once gotten I have by 
no means forgotten, when an unlucky venture has made it 
slip from my hands. Forgive has had a somewhat similar 
history. It signifies primarily to ‘give up.’ I forgive a 
debt (in phrase now antiquated) when I magnanimously 
yield it up to him by whom it is due, waiving my claim 
against him on account of it: I forgive an offence when in 
hike manner I voluntarily release the offender from obliga- 
tion to make amends, from liability to penalty, for it. It is 
only by what was originally a blunder of construction that 
we now talk of forgiving the offender, as well as the offence 
—a blunder like that which we have made in the treatment 
of more than one other word : for instance, in please and like ; 
we said “if you please,” “if you like,” i.e. ‘if it please you,’ 
‘if it like you,’ until we forgot that the you was object of 
the verb used impersonally, and, apprehending it as subject, 
began to say also “if I please,” “if they like;” and again, 
in reproach, which means strictly to ‘approach again,’ to 
bring up anew before a person what he would fain forget, 
and, until its etymology was forgotten, took for direct object 
the offence, and for indirect the offender ; as, “ I reproached 
to my friend his fault.” Befall is ‘fall upon;’ but, if 
some unlucky person is crushed under the ruins of his 
dwelling, we speak, not of the house, but only of the acci- 
dent, as having befallen him. Right is ‘straight, direct,’ 
wrong is ‘wrung, twisted;’ gueer is ‘ crosswise ’—and so on, 
through the whole list of words of the same kind. 
8 


114 ATTENUATION OF THE [ Lect. 


There is a large and important class of words, the history 
of whose development of meaning illustrates, not so much 
an elimination of the physical element, a transfer from a 
sensible to an intellectual use, as an effacement of signifi- 
cance, a fading-out of distinctive colour, a withdrawal of sub- 
stantiality, a reduction to the expression of relation rather 
than of quality. Take as an instance the preposition of, 
already referred to as having been, not long since, undis- 
tinguished from of; in either form or meaning. Of still 
retains its distinct physical sense, of removal in place; it 
means ‘from, away from, forth from ;’ in of, we have 
attenuated this original idea of removal, procedure, derivation, 
into the most general and indefinite one of possession, 
appurtenance, connection: we say the top ef the mountain, 
though the former is not off, but on, the latter; we say the 
father of the boy, as well as the son of the man; we say a 
sword of steel, pride of birth, the time of Moses, the city of 
Athens, and go on. for, from fore, ‘in front of, has 
passed through a process closely similar. Also (A.-S. eal- 
swa) was made up of all and so, and meant ‘ altogether thus, in 
just that way, in like wise;’ now, like the abbreviated form 
of the last expression, likewise, it simply adds a circumstance 
coordinate with one already mentioned; it is hardly more 
than a particle of connection. As, as was pointed out 
above, is a mutilated form of the same word, with its demon- 
strative meaning usually converted into a relative: the act 
of apprehension which, in a phrase like “he is as good as he 
is great” (that is, “he is in that degree or manner good in 
which degree he is great ’), attributes a demonstrative sense 
to the former as, and a relative to the latter, is not less arbi- 
trary than the one which attributes, in “the more, the 
merrier” (that is, ‘in what degree more, in that degree 
merrier’), a relative sense to the former the, and a demon- 
strative to the latter. All those relative words which bind 
the parts of a sentence together into an organie whole, 
instead of leaving it a congeries of independent clauses, are 
of like origin, coming by a gradual change of meaning from 
words originally demonstrative or interrogative. “I knew 
that he waa ill” is but an altered form of “he was ill; I 


111. | MEANING OF WORDS. 115 


knew thut,” or “I knew that thing: viz. he was ill;” “we 
saw the man who dia it” represents “who did it? we saw 
the man,” or “we saw the man [of whom the inquiry is 
made] who did it?” Than is historically the same word as 
then: “he -is mightier than 1” was once “he is mightier, 
then (that is, next after him) I.” Or is a contracted form 
of other. The primary meaning of and is ‘against ;’ the 
simpler form of the latter, again, has made at least par- 
tially the same transition to a connective. Our articles are 
of quite modern development ; az or a is the numeral one ; 
the is the demonstrative that. We saw some time since how 
head has come to stand for ‘ individual ;’ the butcher talks 
of “twenty head of sheep,” as if that part of the animal 
were not the least valuable from his point of view. Hand 
is similarly applied: “the head-carpenter and his twenty 
hands,” if it do not deseribe one Briarean individual, ought 
at least to designate only eleven persons ; but in our usage it 
denotes twenty-one. Even the peculiarly corporal word body 
has been spiritualized, in somebody, anybody, “ if a body meet 
a body,” and so on: to say “nobody was present ”’ is equi- 
valent to saying “not a soul was there,” and would be true, 
however many corpses, or beasts, or bodies metallic, fluid, 
or aériform, might have been within cognizance. The verb 
grow signifies properly ‘to increase, to change from smaller 
to larger,’ but we often use it in the simple sense of gradual 
change, of ‘ becoming,’ and say to grow thin or small, to grow 
tired. By a farther extension of the same process, the verb 
which in our whole family of languages originally meant ‘to 
erow’ (Sansk. bid, Greek phiid) has in many of them passed 
through the idea of ‘becoming’ to that of ‘being’ simply : 
the Latin fwi, our be, been, are its descendants. Indeed, our 
substantive verb to be, the most bodiless and colourless of all 
our words, the mere copula between subject and predicate, 
is made up of the relics of several verbs which once had a 
distinct physical significance: be and been, as just noticed, 
contained the idea of ‘growing ;’ am, art, ts, and are, that 
of ‘sitting;’* was and were, that of ‘ dwelling, abiding.’ 

* I connect, namely, the root as with ds, ‘sitting,’ as being most probably 


a different form of the same original. (thers conjecture the primitive signi 
. fication to have been that of ‘ breathing,’ 
8 * 


116 FORMATION OF PHRASES. [LECE. 


The corresponding verb in modern French is partly filled up 
(étre, étais, été) from the Latin stare, ‘ to stand.’ 

Not only are certain words thus stripped by the users and 
makers of language of the substantial meaning with which 
they once were invested, but phrases are also formed, of two 
or more words, and applied to uses widely remote from those 
which their constituents more generally and properly sub- 
serve. An event, we say, takes place, or comes to pass; &% 
young man turns out ill; his foibles are tellingly hit off, or 
taken off ; though they had seriously fallen out, they made up 
their quarrel, and a good understanding was brought about 
between them; they gave up further attempts; at every new 
turn, he was headed off anew ; I was put up to it, but woefully 
put upon, and shall put up with such treatment no longer; 
don’t take on so, my good fellow—and so on indefinitely. 
Phrases such as these are abundant in every part of language, 
and are of every kind and degree of removal from literalness: 
m some, a moment’s reflection points out the figure or the’ 
implication which has led the way to their establishment in 
current use; in others, the transfer has been so distant, and 
some of its steps so bold or so obscure, that even a careful 
investigation fails fully to show us how it has been accom- 
plished. In phrases, as is well known, consists no small 
part of the idiom of a language; use determines, not merely 
the significance which each word shall bear, but how it shail 
be combined with other words, in order to something more 
than intelligibility—to expressiveness, to force, to elegance 
of style. 

All word-making by combination, as illustrated in the last 
lecture, is closely analogous with phrase-making: it is but 
the external and formal unification of elements which usage 
has already made one in idea. The separate and distinctive 
meaning of the two words in take place is as wholly ignored 
by us who use the expression as is that of the two in break- 
fast ; that we may allow ourselves to say he breakfasted, but 
not 2 takeplaced, is only an accident; it has no deeper 
ground than the arbitrariness of conventional usage. ‘To 
hit off is as much one idea as dof? (from do off), to take on as 
don (from do on), although we are not likely ever to fuse the 


111. FORM-MAKING. 117 


two former into single words, like the two latter. It is 
clear that, as formerly claimed, the significant content of 
words is more plastic than their external form: while our 
language has nearly lost the habit, and so the “ power,” as 
we call it, of making new vocables out of independent ele- 
ments, it is still able to combine and integrate the meanings 
of such elements, to no small extent. 

But again, all form-making includes as an essential part 
something of the same attenuation of meaning of the forma- 
tive element, the same withdrawal of its distinctive sub- 
stantial significance and substitution of one which is rela- 
tional and formal, which we have been illustrating in the 
history of independent words. The ly of godly, homely, 
lively, and so on, no longer means ‘like;’ still less does 
that of fully, mostly, etc. In the ship of lordship, the inde- 
pendeut word shape is no more to be recognized by its sig- 
nificance than by its form. ven the ful of healthful and 
cheerful has been weakened in intent from ‘full of’ to 
‘possessed of, characterized by.’ But there are other 
phrases which exhibit a closer resemblance and more in- 
timate connection with form-making than any hitherto cited. 
The d of loved, as we have already seen, is by origin the 
imperfect did; I loved means etymologically ‘I did or per- 
formed a loving ;’ the d has been converted from an inde- 
pendent word into a formative element, indicative of past 
action, by being compounded with Jove, and then, in the 
relation which it sustained toward that word, losing its dis- 
tinctive force and meaning, and assuming the value of a 
temporal modification merely. With the form J loved, now, 
the phrase J did love is virtually equivalent: it contains the 
same elements, and they have the same logical value: the 
did is there for ne other purpose than the d, its hereditary 
representatiys, and is in idea, not less than the latter, a 
formative element; it impresses a modification of temporal 
form upon the word with which it is connected, and has no 
other office. That it still maintains its grammatical standing 
as a separate word constitutes only a formal, not an essential, 
distinction between the two equivalent expressions. So also 
with the verb have, by the aid of which we form other of 


118 ORIGIN OF FORM WORDS. [ LECT. 


our past tenses, and of which the primitive significance is 
‘possession.’ It is easy to see how “TI have my arma 
stretched out? might pass into “I have stretched out my 
arms,” or how, in such phrases as “he has put on his coat,” 
“we have eaten our breakfast,” “they have finished their 
work,” a declaration of possession of the object in the con- 
dition denoted by the participle should come to be accepted 
as sufliciently expressing the completed act of putting it 
into that condition; the present possession, in fact, implies 
the past action, and, if our use of have were limited to the 
cases in which such an implication was apparent, the ex- 
pressions in which we used it would be phrases only. When, 
however, we extend the implication of past action to every 
variety of case—as in “I have discharged my servant,” “he 
has lost his breakfast,” “we have exposed their errors,” 
where there is no idea of possession for it to grow out of; 
or with neuter verbs, “you have been in error,” “he has 
come from London,” “they have gone away,” where there is 
even no object for the have to govern, where condition, and 
not action, is expressed, and “ you are been,” “he is come,” 
“they are gone” would be theoretically more correct (as 
they are alone proper in German)—then we have converted 
have from an independent part of speech into a purely 
formative element. The same word, by a usage not less 
bold and pregnant, though of less frequent occurrence, we 
make to signify causation of action, as in the phrases “I 
will hawe him well whipped for his impertinence,” “he has 
his servant wake him every morning.” And, yet once more, 
we turn it into a sign of future action, with further im- 
plication of necessity, as in “I have to go to him directly.” 
As is well known, the modern European languages which 
are descended from the Latin have formed their simple 
futures by means of this phrase, eliminating from it the im- 
plication of necessity: the French j’aimerai, ‘I shall love,’ 
for instance, is by origin je aimer ai, i.e. ’ai & aimer, ‘I have 
to love.’ Nor is our own “TI shall love” of different his- 
tory, for I shall means properly ‘I owe, am under obliga- 
tion;’ and the will of “he will love,” although we now so 
commonly employ it as the mere sign of futurity, conveya 


II. ] ORIGIN OF FORM WORDS. 119 


the idea of ‘ wish, intent, determination.’ The Anglo-Saxon 
had no future tense, but habitually employed its present in 
the sense of both present and future; we have struck out, 
in our modern usage, a peculiarly rich synonymy of ex- 
pressions for future action: there are the two already men- 
tioned, I will go, and I shall go, each of which is capable of 
use as simple future, or with a modal implication; further, 
I have to go, with the nearly equivalent I am to go; I am 
going to go (to which the French adds the closely correlative 
expression “I am coming from going,” je viens d@aller, that 
is, ‘I have just gone’); 1 am on the point of going, and I 
am about to go—with which is nearly allied the Hibernicism, 
I am after going, for ‘I have gone. These phrases will 
illustrate the ease with which are found, in the resources of 
a rich and flexible language, means of denoting a given 
relation, the variety in which they may be produced, and 
the arbitrariness with which certain ones are selected for 
most frequent and familiar employment. 

An instance of a purely formal word of a different cha- 
racter is furnished us in the preposition ¢o as “sign of the 
infinitive.” The infinitive is originally and properly the 
verbal noun, and, as a noun, should be governed by any 
preposition which the sense may require. The present usage 
of our language, however, forbids this freedom of construction, 
and assigns to the infinitive to as its almost constant accom- 
paniment. At first, the to was only employed where it had 
its proper significance, as in phrases like “I am here ¢o help 
him,” that is, ‘in order ¢o the helping him,’ “lawful for him 
to eat,” that is, ‘to the eating ;’ * now, no regard whatever 
is had to this consideration, and, to the apprehension of 
every speaker of English, ¢o is as arbitrary and non-signifi- 
cant a sign of this form of the verb as is the ending en of 
the German essen, or ve of the Latin edere. 

Yet another class of words having the grammatical status 
of irdependent members of the sentence, but the logical 


* In Anglo-Saxon, him alyfede to etanne, ‘allowed him unto eating,’ 
the Anglo- -Saxon putting the infinitive after to into a distinct dative case, 
but leaving it uninflected when the object of a verb; as in Ai ongunnom 
stan, ‘they, began eating.’ 


120 VARIETY OF DERIVATIVES [ LECT. 


value of formative elements, is exemplified in the preposition 
of, as already noticed. The of in “a crown of gold” ig 
equivalent to the adjective suffix en in “a golden crown;” 
that in “the son of the king” to the genitive ending s in 
“the king’s son.” 

We have paid the more attention to this kind of words, 
because of their importance in the history of language. 
Such shadowy and half-formal parts of speech as an and the, 
such quasi formative elements as do and have, as to and of, are 
products of the development of language which by their 
prevalence mark a distinct tendency, known as the “ analyti- 
cal,” and characteristic, in a greater or less degree, of many 
of the modern tongues with which ours is related. We 
shall have to take it into further account in connection with 
another department of our subject (see lecture seventh). 

Let us now look at a single example going to show to 
what a rich variety the processes of development of meaning 
may lead among the derivatives of a single verb. Pong, in 
Latin, signifies ‘put,’ or ‘place,’ but we might well spend an 
hour in tracing out all the store of ideas which it has been 
made in our language the means of designating. Some of 
its uses we have inherited from the Latin; others were 
struck out during the later period of the French ; yet others 
have grown up on Hsglish soil; and we are even now far 
from having exhausted its capabilities of expression, From 
the uncompounded root come pose, a poser, position, with its 
many applications, post, with its still more various and 
special uses, posture, positive, and so forth. Then, as com- 
bined with prefixes, for the most part significant merely of 
place and direction, it gives us an apposite remark ; appost- 
tion of nouns; component parts; composure of mind; a great 
composer; compositions and declamations ; a composing-stick ; 
compost-heaps ; compound interest ; to compound a felony; a 
deponent verb; the deponent saith; a deposed king; deposi- 
tions from water; a school-book depository; removal of the 
deposits; a railway depot; an exponent of democratic princi- 
ples; to expose a fraud; exposed to attack; clear exposition 
of a hard text; a lawn with southern exposure; an imposing 
figure; imposts and customs; miserable impostor; consecrated 


IIT. ] FROM A SINGLE ROOT. 12] 


by impositivn of hands ; to impound stray cattle ; an imposing. 
stone ; all his disposable forces ; disposed to sleep ; an amiable - 
disposition ; the prima donna is indisposed ; troops disposed 
in three lines; God disposes; a worthy opponent; the house 
opposite; member of the opposition; divine interposition ; he 
proposed to her; fifth proposition, first book ; propounded for 
admission; locked in sweet repose ; to repose confidence ; 
what do you purpose? he did it on purpose ; an effect sup- 
poses a cause; at least, I suppose so; a supposititious heir ; 
and soon. Here is but a selection from among the multi- 
tude of expressions for heterogeneous conceptions which 
have grown out of the sign for the simple idea of ‘ putting’ 
or ‘placing ;’ but, though a striking, they are not an ex- 
ceptional instance of the manner in which linguistic usage 
deals with all the material of language. As new experiences 
are met with, new deductions drawn, new opinions formed, 
new mental combinations made, new products brought forth, 
new existences discovered, language finds no difficulty in 
enlarging itself to represent them. _ The material which lies 
most conveniently at hand, even if it be not very near, is 
seized and applied to the purpose: that which was general 
is individualized ; that which was individual is generalized ; 
the concrete becomes the abstract ; every variety of meta. 
phor, of elliptical and pregnant expression, is resorted to, and, 
however bold and even startling at first, sinks by degrees to 
the level of ordinary prosaic appellation ; and delicate shades 
of meaning are distinguished by the gradual separation of 
words at first equivalent. The multiplicity of these changes, 
and the variety of their results, our examples have been 
wholly inadequate to set forth with any fulness or com- 
pleteness ; only enough has been said to bring to lighs the 
leading facts and principles, to show what a fertile power of 
inodification and adaptation is inherent in our speech, and 
that, in seeking and finding names for individual objects of 
conception, it is restrained within no narrow limits of action. 

t must not fail to be observed that these processes of 
word-making, of hames-giving, in all their variety, are not, 
in the fullest sense, consciously performed: that is to say, 
they ave not, for the most part, premeditated and reflective, 


122 DEGREES OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE [EEOT, 


There may be found among them, indeed, every degree of 
reflection, sometimes rising even to full premeditation. 
When there is first brought to the knowledge of a com- 
munity some new substance or product, either natural or 
artificial, some result of invention or discovery, some process 
formerly unknown, people ask themselves deliberately 
“what shall we call it?” and it is by a conscious effort 
that they devise and assign its appellation—there being, at 
the same time, an unconscious part to the process; namely, 
the manner in which their selection is guided and de- 
termined by the already subsisting usages and analogies of 
their speech, and by the limitations of their intelligence. 
The zoologist, the chemist, the geologist, when they want 
a new technical term or distinctive name, go of set purpose 
to such sources as their Greek and Latin dictionaries, or 
search out local or personal associations upon which to 
found their choice; they con over the various distinctive 
qualities or accidental circumstances of the thing to be de- 
nominated, and weigh the capabilities and advisabilities of 
the case as deliberately as does the father when deciding 
after which rich uncle, or what noted public character, he 
shall have his son christened. Sometimes the scientific man 
has put upon him the task of devising a terminology, as 
well as a nomenclature—as was the case with those French 
chemists, at the end of the last century, who fixed the 
precise scientific meaning to be thenceforth signified by a 
whoie apparatus of formative elements, of suffixes and pre- 
fixes: for example, in sulphuret, sulphuric, sulphurous, sul- 
phate, sulphite, sulphide, bisulphate, sesquisulphide, and so on. 
This is, indeed, of the nature of an artificial universal lan- 
guage, built up of precise, sharply distinguished, and in- 
variably regular signs for the relations of ideas—such a lan- 
guage as some have vainly imagined it possible to invent and 
teach for all the infinitely varied needs of speech, and for 
the use of the whole human race: the chemical terminology 
is, in its own sphere, of universal applicability, and is 
adopted by chemists of various race and native tongue. But 
human language is not made in this way. The most im- 
portant and intimate part of linguistic growth, that whick 


dil, PROCESSES OF WORD-MAKING. 1235 


affects the vocabulary of general and daily use, earned by 
every child, used in the common intercourse of life, goes 
on in a covert and unacknowledged manner; it is almost 
insensibly slow in its progress; it is the effect of a gradual 
accumulation of knowledge and quickening of insight ; it is 
wrought out, as it were, item by item, from the mass of the 
already subsisting resources of expression : the mind, familiar 
with a certain use of a term, sees and Improves a possibility 
of its extension, or modification, or nicer definition; old 
ideas, long put side by side and compared, prompt a new 
one ; deductions hitherto unperceived are drawn from 
premises already known; a distinction is sharpened; a 
conception is invested with novel associations ; experience 
suggests a new complex of ideas as calling for conjoint ex- 
pression, Speech is the work of the mind coming to a 
clearer consciousness of its own conceptions and of their 
combinations and relations, and is at the same time the 
means by which that clearer consciousness is attained ; and 
hence, it works its own progress; its use teaches its ime 
provement ; practice in the manipulation of ideas as repre- 
sented by words leads the way to their more adroit and 
effective management. A vocabulary, even while undergo- 
ing no extension in substantial content of words and forms, 
may grow indefinitely in expressiveness, becoming filled up 
with new senses, its words and phrases made pregnant with 
deeper and more varied significance. It may do go, and it 
will, if there lie in the nature and circumstances of the 
people who speak it a capacity for such growth, The speech 
of a community is the reflex of its average and collective 
capacity, because, as we have already seen, the community 
alone is able to make and change language ; nothing can 
become a part of the common treasure of expression which is 
not generally apprehended, approved, and accepted, It is not 
true, as is sometimes taught or implied, that a genius or 
commanding intellect, arising among a people, can impress a 
marked effect upon its language—least of all, in the earlier 
stages of linguistic development, or amid ruder and more 
primitive conditions of culture. No individual can affect 
speech directly except by separate items of change in respect 


124 FORM-MAKING UNREFLECTIVE, [LECT. 


to which he sets an example for others to follow and an 
example which will be followed in proportion as the changes 
are accordant with already prevailing usage and naturally 
suggested by it: the general structure and character of lan- 
guage are out of his reach, save as he can raise the common 
intellect, and quicken and fertilize the minds of his fellows, 
thus sowing seed which may spring up and bear fruit in 
language also.. If he attempt anything like innovation, the 
conservatism of the community will array itself against him 
with a force of resistance against which he will be power- 
less. The commanding intellect has much the better 
opportunity to act effectively in a cultivated and lettered 
people, inasmuch as his inciting and lifting fluence can be 
immediately exerted upon so many more of his fellows, and 
even upon more than one generation. 

Especially is it true that all form-making is accomplished 
by a gradual and unreflective process. It is impossible to 
suppose, for instance, that, in converting the adjective like 
into the adverbial suffix ly, there was anything like inten- 
tion or premeditation, any looking forward, even, to the final 
result. One step simply prepared the way for and led to 
another. We can trace the successive stages of the transfer, 
but we cannot see the historical conditions and linguistic 
habits which facilitated it, or tell why, among all the 
Germanic races, the English alone should have given the 
suffix this peculiar application ; why the others content 
themselves without any distinctive adverbial suffix, nor feel 
that their modes of expressing the adverbial relation are less 
clear and forcible than ours. And so in every other like case. 
An aptitude in handling the elements of speech, a capacity 
to perceive how the resources of expression can be applied 
to formative uses, a tendency toward the distinct indication 
of formal relations rather than their implication merely— 
these, in their natural and unconscious workings, constitute 
the force which produces grammatical forms, which builds 
up, piece by piece, a grammatical system, more or less full 
and complete. Every language is the product and expres- 
sion of the capacities and tendencies of a race as bearing 
upon the specific work of language-making; it illustrates 


rr] CONCEPTIONS ANTECEDENT TO THEIR NAMES. 125 


what they could do in this particular walk of human effort ; 
and the variety of product shows the difference of human 
endowment in this regard, even more strikingly than the 
variety of the art-products of different peoples exhibits their 
.diverse grade and kind of artistic power to conceive and 
execute. 

For, as has been already pointed out, and must here again 
be insisted on, every single act in the whole process of mak- 
ing words and forming language, at every period of linguistic 
development, has been a human act. Whether more or less 
deliberately performed, it was always essentially of the same 
kind; it was something brought about by the free action of 
men. Its reasons lay in human circumstances, were felt in 
Euman minds, and prompted human organs to effort. No 
name was ever given save as @ man or men apprehended 
some conception as calling for expression, and expressed it. 
Every idea had its distinct existence before it received its 
distinctive sign; the thought is anterior to the language 
by which it is represented. To maintain the opposite, to 
hold that the sign exists before the thing signified, or that 
a conception cannot be entertained without the support of a 
word, would be the sheerest folly ; it would compel us to 
assert that galvanism could not be recognized as a new form 
of natural force, hitherto undescribed, until its discoverers 
had decided what to style it ; that Neptune was not visible 
in the astronomer’s glass till it had been determined after 
which of the Grecian divinities it should be christened ; that 
the spinner’s mule and jenny were not built till the inventor 
had chosen a name for them; that the aniline colours made 
upon the eye no impressions distinguishable from those of 
hues long familiar until the battle-fields had been pitched 
upon whose names they should bear; that the community 
had no appreciation of the frequent tediousness and imper- 
tinence of official forms until they had agreed to call it red 
tape; that the human race did not see that the colour of 
growing things like leaves and grass was different from those 
of the clear sky, of blood, of earth, of snow, until, from the 
name for growing, they had worked out for it a name green, 
as well as, by some similar process, like names for the 


126 REASONS OF ETYMOLOGY FOUNDED [ LECT. 


others. Men do not lay up in store a list of ideas, to be 
provided with spoken signs when some convenient season 
shall come; nor do they prepare a catalogue of words, to 
which ideas shall be attached when found: when the thing 
is perceived, the idea conceived, they find in the existing 
resources of speech the means of its expression—a name 
which formerly belonged to something else in some way 
akin with it; a combination of words, a phrase, which per- 
haps remains a phrase, perhaps is fused into, or replaced by, 
a single word. Thus, for example, men were proposed in 
ancient Rome for the free suffrages of their fellow-citizens, 
and were, without difficulty, variously described as such, 
before any distinctive appellation for one in such a plight 
had been established ; but the fortuitous circumstance that 
Roman usage required those who were openly seeking office 
to be candidutos, ‘ dressed in white (candidus),’ led by degrees 
to their designation, pregnantly, as candidati; and now, 
through nearly the whole civilized world, he who aspires to 
election or selection to any place or station is styled a 
candidate. 

Thus it is that the reason why anything is called as we are 
accustomed to call it is a historical reason; it amounts to 
this: that, at some time in the past—either when the thing 
was first apprehended, or at some later period—it was con- 
venient for men to apply to it this name, And the principal 
item in this convenience was, that certain other things were 
already named so and so. Until we arrive at the very 
beginnings of speech (the character and origin of which must 
be reserved for discussion at a later period of these lectures), 
every name comes, by combination, derivation, or simple 
transfer of meaning, from some other name or names: men 
do not create new words out of hand; they construct them 
of old material. At the time and under the circumstances, 
then, when each term acquired its given significance, the 
possession of certain other resources of expression, combined 
with certain usages of speech and habits of thought, and 
influenced by external circumstances, caused men’s choice to 
fall upon it rather than upon any other combination of 
sounds.” Thus every word has its etymology or derivation, 


tI. ] IN CONVENIENCE, NOT NECESSITY. 127 


and to trace out its etymology is to follow up and exhibit its 
transfers of meaning and changes of form, as far back and as 
completely as the nature of the case allows. To recur to 
our last example—candidate is the modern abbreviated form 
of candidatus, participle of the (implied) Latin derivative 
verb candidare, ‘to whiten,’ from candidus, ‘ white ;’ and the 
historical circumstance which suggested its selection and 
application to its purpose has been pointed out. Candidus 
is itself a derivative adjective, coming from the verb candeo, 
which means ‘to shimmer, to shine ;’ it designates properly a 
glittering or sheeny white. We have this also in our lan- 
guage, little altered in form, as the word candid ; but, though 
it may be found here and there in old authors employed in 
its sensible, physical signification of ‘white, it has in our 
ordinary use been transferred, by a figure of which every one 
appreciates the naturalness, to indicate a mental quality, 
freedom from bias or prejudice, from dissimulation, from 
deceit—those dark shades and spots on a character. Few 
of us ever think of a connection of idea between candid and 
candidate ; and the less, as the position indicated by the 
latter word is by no means favourable to the development of 
the virtue expressed by the former. The verb candeo we are 
able to trace one or two steps farther back, through caneo and 
canus, to a root can, which signifies ‘ shining ;’ this, to our 
analysis, is an ultimate fact, beyond which we cannot at 
present penetrate. 

But, while words thus have their historical grounds, while 
the etymologist can explain how they came to receive the 
value which we attribute to them, we must beware of ascrib- 
ing too cogent or too permanent a force to the etymological 
reason. It was not a necessary reason; there was no 
element of compulsion in it. The Roman seeker for office 
might just as well have gotten some such name as proponent, 
‘proposer,’ or petent, ‘seeker,’ as the one by which he actu- 
ally came to be called; either of these, it may be claimed, is 
more truly significant than candidate, which expresses only a 
fortuitous circumstance of external garb, and was applicable 
to any one who should choose to wear a white dress. All 
that can be said in reply is that the Romans were in fact 


128 ETYMOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE OF NO ACCOUNT ([LECT, 


guided by the fortuitous rather than the more significant 
circumstance to their selection of aname. So, also, the Latin 
word albus or the Germanic word white might have been not 
less readily than candidus applied to designate the pos- 
session of candour; only the language-makers, for reasons 
which they themselves could not have explained, willed it 
otherwise. Among the various metaphors by which such a 
quality was signifiable and from time to time signified, this 
chanced to be the one which established itself in frequent 
use, and of which the metaphorical origin was by degrees for- 
gotten. From among many possible expedients, it was the 
one pitched upon for filling this special need, for increasing 
in this direction the resources of expression. And then, 
when the expedient is once found, when the name is accepted 
by the community and installed in its office, the etymological 
reason becomes no longer operative; the sole and sufficient 
authority for the use of the term is the common assent and 
custom. Individuals do not go on indefinitely to repeat the 
act of transfer which first allotted a word to its use; they 
establish a direct mental association between the idea and 
the sign, and depend upon that. As was pointed out in the 
first lecture (p. 14), the child does not concern himself with 
questions of etymology when learning to talk; the words 
which he acquires he receives and employs implicitly, for the 
sole reason that those about him employ them. As he grows 
older, he will, in varying degree, according to his turn of 
mind, his general culture, and his particular education, turn 
his attention to etymological inquiries, and please himself 
with tracing out why the words which he has learned or 
learns were elected to the office in which they serve him. 
But it is always a matter of reflection, of learned curiosity ; 
it concerns, not the general users of speech, but him who 
would study its history. To the greatest etymologist who 
lives, not less than to the most ignorant and unreflective 
speaker, the reason why he calls a certain idea by a certain 
name is simply that the community in which he lives so call 
it, and will understand him when he does the same. Ii is 
quite worth while to know how candidate and candid came to 
mean as they do; but our knowledge or our ignorance of thei 


111.] IN THE PRACTICAL USE OF WORDS. 129 


etyinolugy does not determine our use and understanding of 
the terms. It is, no doubt, an interesting and valuable bit 
of information for the physicist that galvanism was named 
after its first discoverer; the fact is one of which no student, 
no well-informed man even, should be ignorant; but one may 
use the word galvanism as well for all practical purposes 
without ever having heard of Galvani; and thousands do it 
every day. How few of those who talk about electricity are 
aware that it signifies by derivation ‘the quality of being like 
amber (Greek, elektron), and has no better ground than the 
accidental circumstance that the first recognized manifest- 
ation of this potent force was the power of attracting light 
objects exhibited by a piece of amber when rubbed? Andas 
to the etymological reason of elektron itself, as Greek de- 
signation of ‘amber,’ it is irrecoverably lost. It is, however, 
far from being at our option to declare the etymology of 
electricity a paltry and insufficient one, and to resolve that 
we will have a name which shall denote some more essential 
quality of the force, and of which we can trace the histor 
back to the very beginning; he would be laughed at for a 
fool who should attempt such a revolution ; a designation in 
the use of which the community are agreed is good enough 
for any one: it requires no other sanction. If the case were 
otherwise, if the right to use a word depended in any man- 
ner on its etymology, then every human being would have to 
be an etymologist, prepared to render a reason, when called 
upon, for everything he utters. But, in fact, only the most 
skilled and practised student of his native tongue can explain 
the history of any considerable part of its vocabulary ; and 
even his researches are apt to carry him back through no 
more than the latest stages of its growth: the ultimate facts 
are out of his reach. 

We study, then, the history of words, not in order to assure 
ourselves of our right to employ them as we do, but to satisfy 
a natural curiosity respecting the familiar and indispensable 
means of our daily intercourse, and to learn something of 
the circumstances and character of those who established 
them in use. It is because every act of word-making is a 


historical act, the work of human minds under the guidance 
9 


150 ~ EXAMPLES OF [ LECT, 


of human cireumstances, that the investigation of language 
is an inquiry into the internal and external history of men. 
The results of such investigation are of the most varied 
character. Sometimes we find at the basis of a word a mere 
blunder of philosophy, as when we talk about lunatics, as if 
we still believed the aberration of their wits to depend upon 
the devious motions of the moon (duna); or a blunder of 
natural history, as when we call our own native American 
feathered biped a turkey, in servile imitation of that ill- 
informed generation of Englishmen, which, not knowing 
whence he came, but surmising that it might probably enough 
be Turkey, dubbed him “the Turkey fowl;” or a blunder of 
geography, as when we style our aborigines Indians, because 
the early discoverers of this continent set their faces west- 
ward from Europe to find India, and thought at first that 
they had found it. Copper, the magnet, parchment commem- 
orate for us the countries Cyprus, Magnesia, and Pergamos, 
whence those substances were first brought to the founders 
of our civilization. Janumit, like candidate, owes its exist- 
ence to a peculiar Roman custom—of dismissing, namely, 
with a slap of the hand a slave made free. Money and mint 
(two different forms of the same original, moneta, the one 
coming from the French monnaie, the other from the Anglo- 
Saxon mynet) tell of Roman superstition and Roman con- 
venience: within the imperial city was raised a temple to 
Juno Moneta, ‘Juno the Monisher,’ in recognition of the 
supernatural monitions the goddess had given them in certain 
crises of their history; and in this temple, as it chanced, 
was set up the first stamp and die for coining money. We 
say calculate, because the early Romans reckoned by the aid 
of little pebbles (calewli). We call a truckling and unscru- 
pulous parasite a sycophant, because it once pleased the men 
of Athens to pass a law forbidding the exportation of figs 
from Attica; which, as is apt to be the case with such laws, 
was little more than a dead letter; while yet there were 
found in the community certain mean fellows who sought to 
gain their selfish ends by blabbing, or threatening to blab, of 
those who violated it (siiko-phantés, ‘fig-blabber’). We put 
on a“ pair of rubders,” because, when that most multifariously 


i11.] ETYMOLOGIES. 131 


valuable substance, caoutchouc, was first brought to us, we 
could find for it no better use than tke rubbing out of 
pencil-marks. A whole chapter of literary history is 
included in the derivation of romantic from Rome : it tells of 
the rise of rude popular dialects, alongside the learned and 
polished Latin, in the various provinces of the Roman 
empire ; and of the rise of modern European fiction, written 
so distinctively in these dialects that it got its name from 
them ; and, finally, of the tone and style of fictitious writing, 
and the characters it deals with. In like manner, a chapter of 
religious history is summed up in the word pagan (literally, 
‘villager’): it tells of the obstinate conservation of heathen- 
ism in the villages and hamlets under Roman dominion, 
when the cities had already learned and embraced Chris- 
tianity. And, once more, slave suggests a chapter in ethno- 
logical history: it tells of the contempt in which the Slaves 
or Slavonians of eastern and central Europe were held by the 
more powerful and cultivated Germans, and of the servitude 
_ to which so many of them were reduced. Several among the 
words we have thus instanced—as lunatic, candidate, ro- 
mantic, money—farther include, as an essential part of their 
history, the career of one great conquering and civilizing 
power, the Roman, whose language, along with its knowledge 
and institutions, has been spread to every part of the globe. 
The etymology of moon, as signifying ‘measurer,’ has given 
us an interesting glimpse of the modes of thought of that 
primitive people who first applied this name to the earth’s 
satellite, and to whom her office as a divider of times was so 
prominent among her attributes. And this is but one 
among innumerable instances in which our conceptions of 
olden times and peoples are aided, are made definite and 
vivid, by like means. To study the moral and intellectual 
vocabulary of any tongue is of high interest, and full of 
instruction as to the laws and phenomena of association 
which have led to its development out of the earlier signs 
for physical and sensible things: we are constantly brought 
to the recognition both of the unity of human nature, as 
shown by the general resemblances which such study brings 
to light, and of the diversity of human character anid circum- 
9¢ 


132 OBLIVION OF ETYMOLOGIES | LEC® 


stance, as exhibited in the etymological variety of corres 
sponding appellations. In this capacity of language to yield 
to its historical investigator information concerning both the 
internal life and external history and circumstances of those 
who have made it what it is, lies, as was pointed out in the 
outset of our inquiries, no small portion of the interest 
attaching to linguistic study. 

But etymological reminiscences, while thus of the highest 
value to him who reflects upon language and examines its 
history, are, as regards the practical purposes of speech, of 
very subordinate consequen:e ; nay, they would, if more pro- 
minent before our attention, be an actual embarrassment to 
us. Language would be half spoiled for our use by the 
necessity of bearing in mind why and how its constituents 
have the value we give them. ‘The internal development of 
a vocabulary, too, would be greatly checked and hampered by 
a too intrusive etymological consciousness. All significant 
transfer, growth of new meanings, form-making, is directly 
dependent upon our readiness to forget the derivation of our 
terms, to cut loose from historical connections, and to make 
the tie of conventional usage the sole one between the thing 
signified and its spoken sign. Much the greater part of the 
resources of expression possessed by our language would be 
struck off at a blow, if a perceived bond of meaning between 
etymon and derivative were a requisite to the latter’s exist- 
ence and use. Those, then, are greatly in error who would 
designate by the name “linguistic sense” (sprachsinn) a 
disposition to retain in memory the original statws and value 
of formative elements, and the primary significance of trans- 
ferred terms; who would lay stress upon the maintenance 
of such a disposition, and regard its wane as an enfeeble- 
ment, a step downward toward the structural decay of lan. 
guage. On the contrary, the opposite tendency is the true 
principle of lively and fertile growth, both of the form and 
content of speech, and, as we shall see hereafter, it prevails 
most in the languages of highest character and destiny. A 
certain degree of vividness, of graphic and picturesque 
quality, it is true, is conferred upon a term which has been 


applied by a metaphor to a mental or philosophic use, by the 


y 


i. 


in | NECESSARY TO LINGUISTIC GROWTH. 133 


continued apprehension of the metaphor; but vividness is a 
quality which is dearly bought at the expense of any degree 
of obje>tive clearness, of dry and sober precision ; and it can 
always be attained, when really wanted, by new figures, after 
old figures have become prosaic appellations. As we rise, 
too, in the scale of linguistic use, from that which is straight- 
forward and unreflective to that which is elaborate, pregnant, 
artistic, etymological considerations in many cases rise in 
value, and constitute an important element in that suggest- 
iveness which invests every word, giving it its delicacy of 
application, making it full of significance and dignity where 
another term, coarsely synonymous with it, would be tame 
and ineffective. A pregnant implication of etymologie 
meaning often adds strikingly to the force and impressive- 
ness of an expression. Yet this is but one element among 
many, and its degree of consequence is, I am convinced, apt 
to be over-estimated. To recur once more to some of our 
former illustrations—while an allusion to the whiteness of 
soul signified in candid may touch and interest one whose 
classical education enables him to recognize and appreciate 
it, nothing but a joke or a conceit could well be extracted 
from the etymology of candidate; while apprehend affords 
possible ground for a use in which both the physical and 
intellectual meanings shall be clearly felt, the one enforcing 
the other, understand would lend itself to no such treatment. 
And most of our words are in the condition of candid, can- 
didate, and understand ; either, as in the case of the two last, 
the etymolog ry is trivial or obscure, or, as in the case of the 
first, it is within reach only of the learned, and cannot aid 
the general speaker and hearer. On the whole, a word, 
both in 1ts direct significance and in its suggestiveness, is 
just what our usage makes it. Hardly any two vocables 
that we employ are more instinct with deep meaning, more 
untranslatable into other tongues, than home and comfart ; 
yet neither of them borrows aught from etymology ; the one 
signifies by derivation nothing more intimate than the place 
where one lives, the other, than the conferral of strength 
(con-fortare) ; nor has either an etymon in English, dis- 
zoverable without curious researcu. It is true that fatherly 


134 OUR USE OF WORDS INDEPENDENT [ LECT. 


brotherly, womanly have, to our apprehension, a greater 
depth and intimacy of significance than paternal, fraternal, 
feminine, and so in many other like cases; yet the part of 
this which is due to the perceived connection of the former 
with father, brother, woman is probably less than is usually 
imagined ; the difference of the two classes consists much 
more in their character as Anglo-Saxon and as Latin respect- 
ively, and in the more formal and learned use of the latter 
class, as is usual with the Latin part of our language, when 
compared with the other. How independent of all etymolo- 
gical aid is our conventional sense of the meaning of the 
words we familiarly use may be shown by a great variety of 
facts in our language. It is convenient to have the various 
conjugational and declensional parts of our verbs and nouns 
agree in form as in sense: where we say I love, to say also 
he loves, we love, they loved, having loved ; where we say man, 
to say also man’s, men, men’s ; yet we say I am, he ts, we are, 
they were, having been, and I, my, we, our, she and her, go and 
went, think and thought, and so on, without any sense what- 
ever of hesitation or difficulty. So, on the other hand, it 
gives us no manner of trouble to separate words which 
ought, according to the usual analogies of the language, to 
stand in a near relation of meaning together; however close 
may be their correspondence of form, it does not disturb the 
independent act of association by which we bind together 
each separate sign and its own conventional idea: take as 
instances home and homely, scarce and scarcely, direct and 
directly, lust and lusty, naught and naughty, clerk and clergy, 
a forge and forgery, candid and candidate, hospital and hospi- 
tality, idiom and idiocy, light, alight, and delight, guard and 
regard, approach and reproach, hold, behold, and beholden— 
and it would be easy to gather an indefinite list of such 
words. They furnish, indeed, only another illustration of 
that power of the mind over its instruments which appears 
in the facility and directness wherewith, as has been already 
pointed out, we select from among the various and ofter 
very diverse meanings of a single word—such as hind, like, 
become, court, head——that one which the circumstances and 
the connection require. They help us to apprehend the 


IIT. | OF ETYMOLOFICAL AID. 185 


true relation of our speech to our thoughts, as being their 
assistant and means of communication, not their director or 
indispensable accompaniment. 

Our review of the processes constituting the life of lan- 
guage is now completed: in the next lecture, we shall go on 
to consider the circumstances which hasten or retard their 
action, and their effect in bringing about the separation of 
languages into dialects 


LECTURE IV. 


Varying rate and kind of linguistic growth, and causes affecting it. 
Modes of growth of the English language. Influences conservative of 
linguistic identity. Causes producing dialects; causes maintaining, 
producing, or extending homogeneity of speech. Hl -strations : history 
of the German language; of the Latin; of the English. The English 
language in America. 


We have, in the last two lectures, occupied ourselves with 
tracing out and illustrating by typical examples the chief 
processes of that incessant change, that linguistic growth, 
which marks a language as living, as undergoing, in the 
minds and mouths of a community, constant adaptation to 
their needs, constant adjustment to their preferences and 
caprices. ‘These processes, as we saw, have to do both with 
the external form of speech, its spoken and audible body, 
and with its internal content, its intended and apprehensible 
meaning. As regards the former, they appeared to be of 
two general kinds or classes: on the one hand, they partake 
of the nature of corruption and decay, consisting in the ab- 
breviation and mutilation of existing words, the wearing off 
of formative elements and consequent loss of forms, the 
abandonment of old distinctions along with the means of 
their expression, the dying out of words and phrases from 
memory and use; on the other hand, they are of the nature 
of growth, providing for the repair of this waste, and the 
supply of new additions to the resources of expression, by 
the putting together of old material into fresh combinations, 
the elaboration of formative elements out of words possess- 


Iv. ] VARIOUS RATE OF LINGUISTIC GROWTH. Loar 


ing ind »pendent significance, and the application of accidental 
differences to the .practical uses of significant distinction. 
And this external decay and growth is accompanied by, and 
accessory to, a rich and ever-progressing development of 
ideal content, which deals at its will with all the material of 
speech, which contracts, expands, and transfers the mean- 
ings of words, which converts the physical and concrete into 
the intellectual and abstract, which produces variety out of 
sameness, and is never at a loss for means whereby to pro- 
vide with its suitable sign any fresh acquisition to the sum 
of things known, any new conception or deduction. In 
continuing at present our discussion of the life of language, 
we have first to note the varying rate at which the processes 
of growth go on, and to bring to light some of the circum- 
stances which affect their progress. 

Uhe fact of variation in the rate of linguistic growth, it 
may be remarked by way of introduction, is a very obvious 
one. Our own English has changed much less during the 
past two hundred and fifty years than during the like period 
next preceding; and vastly less in: the last five centuries 
han during the five which went before them. The German 
of the present day is not more altered from the ancient type 
of Germanic speech than was the English of six or seven 
centuries azo; nor the Icelandic now eurrent than the 
Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred and his predecessors. The 
modern Romanic dialects—the Spanish, French, Italian, and 
the rest—have deviated far more widely from the Latin of 
Cicero and Virgil than has the dialect of the Greeks from 
that of Cicero’s Hellenic contemporaries ; and they differ 
from one another not a little in the degree, as well as in the 
mode, of their respective deviation. To go somewhat 
further from home, the Arabic of the Bedouin in this cen- 
tury 1s incomparably more nearly identical with that of the 
tribes through whose borders the children of Israel were led 
by Moses than is any one of our contemporary European 
tongues with its ancestor of the same remote period. And there 
are to be found upou the face of the earth dialects which are 
even now so rapidly changing that those who speak them 
would be unable to converse with cither their ancestors 


138 EXTERNAL CIRCUMSTANCES “LECT. 


or their descendants across an interval of four or five generae 
tions. , 
Now the particular modes and departments of linguistic 
change are so diverse that no one cause, or kind of causes, 
can affect them all, or affect them all alike, either to quicken 
or toretardthem. But the plainest and most apprehensible 
influence is that which is exerted by change of external cir- 
cumstances, surroundings, mode of life, mental and physical 


activity, customs and habits ; and to this, accordingly, we will - 


first direct our attention. How powerfully such causes may 
act upon language will be best shown, perhaps, by imagining 
an extreme case. Suppose an illiterate English family to be 
cast away upon a coral islet in the Pacific, and to be left 
there isolated through a succession of generations. How 
much of our language would at once begin to become useless 
to them! All thnga is connected with variety of scenery, as 
hill and dale, as rock and river ; with diversity of season, of 
temperature, of skyey influences ; ; with wealth of animal and 
vegetable ie) with multifariousness of experience, of occu- 
pation, of material, of production—and much more, which it 
is needless to specify. For a certain period, some part of 
this might be kept alive by memory and tradition, but not 
for ever; it would lose its distinctness before the mind, be- 
come shadowy, and by degrees die out ; and its loss would 
be facilitated by that stupefying effect which the climate and 
mode of life, with their restricted limits and dull uniformity, 
would unavoidably have upon the mind ; vigour of thought 
and liveliness ef sentiment would be likely to decline ; and, 
after the lapse of a sufficient period to allow these causes 
their full effect, the wealth of English speech might be re- 
duced to a poverty comparable with that of some among the 
present Polynesian dialects. But suppose, on the other 
hand, a Polynesian family set down in the midst of a country 
like Iceland, amid magnificent and terrible scenery, amid 

varieties of nature intmerabile, where hard labour and 
prucent forethought, tasking all tl 1e moral and physical 
energies of man, are needed to preserve life and make it en- 
durable—suppose them to be able to bear and adapt them- 
selyes to this tremendous change, and how rapidly would 


[v.j AFFECT LINGUISTIC GROWTH. 139 


their language grow in names and expressions for objects, 
processes, experiences, emotions, relations ! 

This is but a magnified example of what is always and 
everywhere going on in language: it expands and contracts 
in close adaptation to the circumstances and needs of those 
who use it; it is enriched and impoverished along with the 
enrichment or impoverishment of their minds. We have 
already pointed out that the lowest and least educated classes 
of English speakers use not a tenth of the words which 
constitute to our apprehension the English tongue; the re- 
duction, then, of the English people in its entirety to the 
condition of the classes referred to would imply the utter ex- 
tinction of more than nine-tentuas of its resources of expres- 
sion: and all declension of civilization, decay of natural 
vigour, intermission of instruction, tends, in its way and 
measure, toward such a result; while, on the other hand, a 
race that is growing in knowledge and rising in character 
makes its tongue richer and nobler at every step of its up- 
ward career. But it is needless to insist farther upon a 
truth so obvious: no one will think of denying that the con- 
tent of any language, in words and phrases and their mean- 
ings, must correspond with and be measured by the mental 
wealth of the community to whom it belongs, and must 
change as this changes. It is but the simplest corollary 
from the truth which we have already established, that men 
make their own language, and keep it in existence by their 
tradition, and that they make and transmit it for their own 
practical uses, and for no other end whatsoever. 

A vastly more subtle and difficult question is, in what 
shall consist the linguistic growth which change of cireum- 
stance demands, or to which varying character and choice 
impel: how far shall it lie in the accession or withdrawal 
of words and meanings of words,.and how far in develop- 
ment or decay of linguistic structure? It was pointed out 
in our first lecture that change of vocabulary, while it is the 
most legitimate and inevitable of any that a language under- 
goes, 1s also the least penetrating, touching most lightly 
the essential character of speech as the instrument of 
thought. And we saw later (p. 83) how such words as 


140 RECENT MODES OF GROWTH fLECT, 


photograph and telegraph are brought in and naturalized, 
fitted with all the inflectional apparatus which the language 
possesses, without any further consequences. Sunt are 
mere additions to speech, which may affect the sum and 
aggregate value of its resources of expression, often to a 
considerable extent, without modifying its organism, or alter- 
ing its-grammatical form, its apprehension of relations and 
command of the means of signifying them. And yet, the 
same circumstances which lead to the great and rapid develop- 
meiit of a vocal especially where it takes place out 
of native resources, and in a less conscious and artificial way 
—may have an indirect effect upon grammatical develop- 
ment also; where so much change is going on, so much 
that is new coming into use, the influence will naturally be 
felt in some measure in every part of the language. Hints 
of such a possibility are discoverable even in the modern 
history of our own speech: graph, for example, has been 
brought in as the final member of so many new compounds 
that it almost presents itself to the consciousness of English 
speakers as a formative element, having a given oflice, and 
so constituting a part of the apparatus of English derivation; 
while ism, though of ultimate Greek origin, and coming to 
us through the French, has become a thoroughly English 
suffix, admitting of the most familiar and extended applica- 
tion in forming new words. So distinct, indeed, is our 
apprehensicn of the specific value of the ending ism that we 
are avle to cut it off and make an independent word of it, 
talking of a person’s ésms, or of his favourite 7sm—as we also 
speak, less familiarly, of ana, ‘ personal reminiscence and 
anecdote,’ or, in a half-humorous way, of the ologies, 
: higaches of leatnad study.’ 

We cannot, perhaps, better illustrate this subject of the 
modes of linguistic change as determined in their respective 
degree of operation by the influence of circumstances, than 
by briefly examining the way in which our own speech is 
now adapting itself to the growing needs of its speakers. 
The call upon it for increase of expressiveness during the 
past century and at the present time has been and is hardly 
less than would have been that upon the dialect of our 


a 


Iv. ] IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 14] 


imagined Polynesians in their new Icelandic home. Doubt- 
less there was never before in the history of the world a 
time when men were accumulating with such rapidity know- 
ledge of the past history and present constitution of the 
whole universe of created things—knowledge which is not, 
it is true, necessarily wisdom or virtue, but which can and 
ought to turn to both. A part, now, of this new knowledge 
aah a oa of the Deu’ Hyland gh the general com- 


because it consists only in the Bettok ta Perea of things 
long since observed and named. However much astronomy 
and physics may teach us respecting the swn and the planets, 
we continue to call them as of old; the words heat, cold, 
light, green, blue, red stand their ground i in general use, not- 
withstanding the new vibratory theories, and the w onderful 
discoveries lately made in the spectrum of colours ; pudding- 
stone is pudding-stone, and trap is trap, now as before the 
geologist had explained the origin of either; substances still 
fall to the earth and rise and fioat in the air, even after the 
discovery of gravitation; rubbed amber and the loadstone 
attract, as they did ere men had heard of electricity and 
magnetism as cosmical forces. There is, and evidently in 
the nature of the case can be, no limit to the extent to which 
a language may thus become impregnated with clearer know- 
ledge and deeper meaning; and it has been already pointed 
out (p. 21) that the speech of different individuals at the 
same period may vary to almost any degree in the implica- 
tion of these qualities, not less than the speech of the general 
community at different periods. Butin great part, also, the 
modern additions to knowledge have been of such a sort as 
to demand the provision of a store of new signs: they have 
included an immense number of new particulars, things 
before unobserved or confounded with others under the same 
names, bat which, being made the subject of distinct concep- 
tious, have come to require specific appellations, that men 
might communicate with one another respecting them. 
Even this want has in some measure been filled without 
external change of the language, by the internal development 
of its resources, as illustrated in the preceding lecture, by the 
‘ 


142 RECENT MODES OF GROWTH [LECT 


application of a not inconsiderable number of old words to 
new uses. Whenever any branch of knowledge, any art or 
science, either originates or is extended and perfected, the 
natural impulse is always to subserve its new uses with our 
old phraseology. ‘The new classifications, substances, pro- 
cesses, products are not so unlike those already familiar to 
us that they may not be largely called by the same names, 
without fear of obscurity or error. Every technical vocabu- 
lary is thus made up to no small extent of the terms of 
common life, more precisely or more pregnantly used. The 
botanist talks of leaves and flowers ; but in either term he 
includes some things that the common man would exclude, 
and the contrary. Current, conductor, induction, in the 
mouth of the electrician, mean things of which he who 
knows nothing of physics has no conception. Many a man 
who is aware that cohere means ‘ stick together’ would be at 
a loss to distinguish cohesion from adhesion. Atom, base, acid, 
salt, affinity, reaction, are but instances of the words innu- 
merable to which the chemist has given a new and special 
significance. In fact, the whole apparatus of common speech, 
as applied to the more definite and sharply distinguished uses 
of science, undergoes a kind of working-over and adaptation, 
which is of every degree, from such a conscious and artificial 
application as that of the word salt, used to express a large 
class of chemical compounds regarded as analogous with the 
substance formerly called by that name, down to such 
simple limitation or distincter apprehension of the true force 
of a term as is hardly separable from that change of impli- 
cation without change of identity which we have illustrated 
above, by reference to the words sun, heat, rise and fall, ete. 
The mode of linguistic growth which we are now considering 
does, indeed, shade off into the former one, and is most 
nearly akin with it, in nature and in necessity. No language 
can possibly lose the capacity for it without losing its very 
life ; in some languages, as we shall see hereafter, it is com- 
pelled to do the whole work of linguistic adaptation, external 
growth being a thing unknown. 

In our own tongue, however, external growth, as repre- 


sented by the formation of new derivatives, and new combin- 
e 


rv.] IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 143 


ations of existing materials, is not altogether extinct, 
though reduced to a comparatively low grade of activity, and 
restricted in sphere. To its chief modes of action we have 
already, in other connections, had occasion to refer. It 
consists mainly in what we have called the mobilization of 
our words, the application to them of those formative 
elements which still remain to us with capacity of living use. 
and by which we produce both inflections and derivative 
words, as we have need of them. Increase of these our 
means of internal development is all but impracticable. Our 
most recent organically developed suffix is the adverbial end- 
ing ly, which has been found above so valuable in illustrating 
the general method of suffix-formation. Yet not a few ele- 
ments of Latin origin have won by degrees the right to play 
an active part in the making of new English words: such 
are the prefixes en, dis, re, the suffixes ment, ess, able, ous, ic, 
ize, sm, fy, and others; nor, as we have seen, is the possi- 
bility even of farther additions to the list totally cut off. 
An instance of a rather artificial and abnormal extension of 
formative apparatus was afforded us by the introduction of 
the chemical terminology referred to in the last lecture (p. 
122); the modern history of scientific nomenclature pre- 
sents other similar cases; and the exigencies of common use, 
directed by the custom and authority of the learned, may 
yet cause some of these ingrafted elements to germinate 
and flourish as integral parts of the general system of speech. 
No such results are at all likely to follow from the combin- 
ation and integration of elements of our own proper lan> 
guage which are now independent. Of composition, as a 
means of enrichment of our vocabulary, we make at present 
but a limited use: steamboat and railroad are familiar repre- 
sentatives of a class which, though not inconsiderable in 
numbers, forms a far less proportion of the niodern growth 
in our tongue than in most others of its kindred. 

Such of the needs of language-making as are not supplied 
by us in the methods already noticed are satisfied by the 
borrowing of words from other tongues; and this, as every 
one knows, is an expedient to which excessive resort is had 
in English. Our dictionaries have been filled up with 


144 INTRODUCTION INTO ENGLISH [ LECT. 


thousands upon thousands of Greek and Latin words; and 
thousands more, too purely technical as yet to be admitted 
into the dictionaries, are current among certain classes of 
our community. The circumstances, external and internal, 
which give such prevalence among us ‘to this mode of lin- 
guistic growth, are many and various. Tirst among them, 
we may refer to the scantiness of our formative apparatus, 
and the indisposition to an extensive production of new com- 
pounds which characterizes our speech: these limitations to 
the capacity of internal development compel a recurrence 
to external wealth. Then, the combination into which our 
originally Germanic dia ect was forced, by pressure of his- 
torical SOs with the Romanic tongue of the conquer- 
ing Normans, w hile it brought immedi el y into general use 
a host of terms of classical origin, opened the door for their 
indefinite multiplication, by creating analogies to which 
they could attach themselves, giving them such support in 
popular usage as took away the strangeness of aspect which 
they would ‘else have had. Yet it is true that the words of 
common life, those which every English-speaking child learns 
first and continues to use oftenest, are overwhelmingly of 
Anglo-Saxon origin, are Germanic: Latin and Greek deriva- 
tives come in ‘abundantly with culture, learning, special 
scientific training. And this explains in part the modern 
preponderance of such derivatives. The knowledge which 
they are introduced to represent is of a learned cast, not 
interesting in its details the general community of English 
speakers, nor accessible to them; belonging, rather, to a 
special class, which feels itself more closely united by bonds 
of community with like classes in other nations than with 
the mass of its own countrymen. ‘There is a fellowship, a 
solidarity, among the chemists of Europe and America, for i in- 
stance, which makes them name things on principles accepted 
among themselves, and out of languages known alike to them 
all, rather than out of the stores of expression, and in accord- 
ance with the usages, of their own vernaculars. Itis doubt- 
ful whether any languap ce that ever existed could have made 
provision healthily, fete its own internal resources, for the 
expression of that infinite number of new particulars which 


Iv. ] OF GREEK AND LATIN WoRDs. 145 


modern science has been pouring in of late upon the general 
aggregate of knowledge. Think, for example, of the per- 
plexity of the naturalist who returns from an exploring tour 
with a thousand new species of plants and animals, if he 
were compelled to devise vernacular designations for them 
all! And how useless the effort! They will remain for 
ever unknown to nineteen twentieths, perhaps, of those who 
speak his speech, and if one or another of them should ever 
become introduced to general knowledge, they would easily 
enough acquire familiar names. No modern language, then, 
whatever its superiority to the English in the capacity of 
internal growth, attempts to fill such departments of expres 

sion otherwise than by borrowing from the Latin and Greek, 
happy in the possession of stores so rich, so accessible, and 
80 manageable, to draw upon. The names of animal and 
vegetable species, of their parts and specific differences, of 
mineral elements and compounds, of processes and relations, 
and so forth, are Latin or Latinic through the whole civilized 
world. Ifthe German is more inclined to favour terms of 
native growth, and for hydrogen, oxygen, acid, says “water-sub- 
stance ” (wasserstof’), “ sour-substauce ” (sauerstoff), “sour- 
ness,” (sdwre), and the like, it may be seriously doubted 
whether the gain is of appreciable value. We have seen how 
little the act of association which binds together idea and sign 
is dependent upon the aid of etymological suggestiveness; and 
the forcing of a great variety of new specific meanings in a 
brief space of time upon the old material of a tongue may 
make quite as much for confusion as for intelligibility and 
vividness of expression. It is comparatively easy for a com- 
munity to provide out of its vernacular resources of speech 
for that ordinary growth of knowledge, experience, and 
wisdom which comes in the main by the working over of 
conceptions already acquired and named, and only in lesser 
degree by the apprehension of new particulars; but we have 
only to rejoice that our language 1s by fortunate cireum- 
tances saved from a strain which the present conditions 
of our culture would otherwise have put upon it, and which 
is more severe than any living tongue has ever been obliged 
to endure. 

10 


146 IMPORTATION OF FOREIGN WORDS, [LECT. 


But even things of the most common use and knowledge 
come to bear with us designations of learned and artificial 
make. A certain showy flower, introduced not very long 
ago by learned intervention to the parterres of the wealthy, 
but now found in every poor man’s garden, and almost as 
familiar as the sun-flower or the rose, is known only by the 
name dahlia, given it by its botanical describer in honour of 
an earlier botanist, Dahl. The telegraph, a scientific device, 
keeps its foreign scientific title, not in our own country only, 
but all over the globe, although it has become an institution 
almost as universal and indispensable as the post. A sub- 
stance over whose discovery and application no small part of 
our community has gone wild within the past few years, has 
not retained its honest English appellation of rock oil, 
or mimeral oil, but has accepted from the learned the equiva- 
lent Latin name petrolewm, and is so called by millions who 
have no knowledge whatever of the derivation and meaning 
ofthe term. The influence of the learned class in the pro- 
cess of English names-giving has been for many centuries a 
growing one, and has now become greatly predominant; and 
with it has grown, somewhat unduly, the introduction of 
classic word and phrase, to supplement, or even to replace, 
native English expression. There is a pedantically learned 
style which founds itself on the Latin dictionary rather than 
the English, and discourses in a manner half unintelligible 
except to the classically educated: but this is only the fool- 
ish exaggeration of a tendency which has become by degrees 
an integral part of English speech. To draw in like manner 
upon the resources of any other tongue (as, for instance, 
upon the German) would be a fault of a very different cha- 
racter—a pure impossibility, an intolerable affectation, 
because unsupported by anything in the previous usages of 
our mother-tongue, | 

We see, then, that the most obvious and striking peculi- 
arity of English linguistic growth, the wholesale importation 
of foreign terms, is one by which it differs only in degree 
from other linguistic growth, ancient and modern, and that 
this degree of difference is explained by the circumstances 
of the case—the learned character of much of the knowledge 


Iv.] AND ITS CAUSES. 147 


demanding representation, the sluggishness of the native 
processes of word-formation, aud the presence of numerous 
words of classic origin in our familiar speech ; all which 
circumstances have begotten and fostered a habit of resorting 
more and’more for the supply of new needs to the accessible 
aid abundant stores of classical expression. The determining 
causes are wholly historical. The inaptness for internal de- 
velopment, the aptness to borrow, which distinguish our 
language from others of Germanic origin, are both mainly 
traceable to the Norman invasion. In consequence of that 
event, the Anglo-Saxon was for a time in danger of extine- 
tion, or of reduction to the rank of a vulgar patois. Political 
conditions, severing Anglo-Norman interests from those of 
the continent, and originating a common English feeling in 
the whole population, notwithstanding its diverse elements, 
led to a fusion of Norman-French and Saxon-English, instead 
of a displacement of the latter by the former: but, when the 
new tongue came forth, it was found shorn of much of its 
grammatical power, greatly altered in its forms and modes 
of construction. The purity and directness of linguistic 
tradition had been broken up; the conservative influence 
exercised upon the foundation-language by the cultivated 
class of its speakers had been for a time destroyed, and 
popular inaccuracies and corruptions allowed full sway; a 
mode of speech was learned by considerable masses of a popu- 
lation to whose fathers it was strange and barbarous; the 
rest had admitted to their daily and familiar use a host of 
new words on which their old apparatus of inflection sat 
strangely: and this was the result. So is it likely ever to 
be, when the intermingling on nearly equal terms of races of 
diverse speech issues in the elaboration, by mutual accommo- 
dation and compromise, of a new mixed dialect which all 
shall learn and use alike, 

We must be careful not to mistake the nature of the 
obstacle which prevents the liberal increase of our vocabulary 
by means of combination of old materials. It is wholly sub- 
jective, consisting in our habits and preferences. There is 
hardly a compound formed in German, for example, which 


would not, if literally translated by an English compound, 
10 * 


148 CIRCUMSTANCES AFFECTING THE [ LECT. 


be understood, and which we might not therefore imitate, if 
intelligibility were all that we had to consult in our word- 
making. But we are obliged also to have in view the pre- 
possessions of the community ; and this is not a thing which 
they are used to and will approve. The whole process of 
language-making and language-chauging, in all its different 
departments, is composed of single acts, performed by indi- 
viduals ; yet each act is determined, not alone by the needs 
of the particular case, but also by the general usages of the 
community as acting in and represented by the individual; 
so that, in its initiation as well as its acceptance and ratifi- 
cation, it is virtually the act of the community, as truly con- 
ventional as if men held a meeting for its discussion and 
decision. 

We have hitherto considered chiefly the effect of circum- 
stances upon the growth of language, its enrichment with 
the means of designating new conceptions and representing 
new judgments. We have also briefly to examine their 
influence upon linguistic decay, upon phonetic change and | 
grammatical corruption. These, as has been already suffi- 
ciently pointed out, are the result of the defective tradition 
of language ; by carelessness in the acquisition of words, or 
by inaceuracy in their reproduction, men change from 
generation to generation the speech which they transmit. 
It is evident, then, that everything which assists the accuracy 
of linguistic tradition tends to preserve the phonetic and 
grammatical structure of language from alteration. Where 
speech is most unconsciously employed, with most exclusive 
attention to the needs and conveniences of the moment, with 
least regard to its inherited usages, there its changes are 
rifest. Any introduction of the element of reflection is con- 
servative in its effect. A people that think of their speech, 
talk about it, observe and deduce its rules and usages, will 
alter it but slowly. A tendency to do this sometimes forms 
a part of a nation’s peculiar character, being the result of 
qualities and circumstances which it is well-nigh or quite 
impossible to trace out and explain ; but often it is called 
forth, or favoured and strengthened, by very obvious con- 
ditions; by admiring imitation of the ways and words of 


Iv.] RATE OF LINGUISTIC DECAY. 149 


them of old time ; by the possession of a traditional litera- 
ture; but, most of all, by a recorded literature, the habit of 
writing, and a system of instruction. Culture and education 
are the most powerful of all the forces which oppose lin- 
guistic change. The smallest conceivable alterative influence 
will emanate from one who has been trained to speak 
correctly by a conscious effort, and who is accustomed to 
write what he says almost as frequently and naturally as he 
speaks it. Words, in their true form and independent 
entity, are too distinctly present to his mind for him to take 
part either in their fusion or mutilation. Hence the effect 
of literary culture is to fix a language in the condition in 
which it happens to be found, to assure to it the continued 
possession of the formative processes which are then active 
in its development, but to check or altogether prevent its 
acquisition of any others ; to turn its prevailing habits into 
unalterable laws; and to maintain its phonetic character 
against anything but the most gradual and insidious change. 

Thus far in the history of the world, this kind of con- 
servative influence has usually been active only within the 
limits of a class; a learned or priestly caste has become the 
guardian of the national literature and the conservator of the 
tongue in which it was written ; while to the masses of the 
people both have grown strange and unfamiliar. Deprived 
of the popular support, the cultivated dialect has at once 
begun to lose its vitality ; for no language can remain alive 
which is not answering all the infinitely varied needs of a 
whole community, and adapting itself in every part to their 
changes ; it is stinted of its natural and necessary growth 
when it is divorced from general use and made the exclusive 
property of a class. Thus there come to exist among the 
same people two separate tongues; the one an inheritance 
from the past, becoming ever more stiff and constrained, 
and employable only for special uses; the other the pre- 
duction of the present, growing constantly more unlike the 
other by the operation of the ordinary processes of lingnistic 
change; full of inaccuracies and corruptions, if we choose 
to call them so, but also full of a healthy and vigorous life, 
which enables it finally to overthrow and replace the learned 


150 ANCIENT AND MODERN [ LECT, 


or sacred dialect of which it is the offspring. Such has been 
the origin and such the fate of all the learned dialects which, 
in various parts of the world, have been preserved as “ dead 
languages,” for the purposes of learned communication, after 
losing their character as the vernacular speech of a com- 
munity: for instance, the ancient Egyptian, long kept up for 
sacred uses, and written in the hieroglyphic signs, after both 
language and letters had in popular use taken on another 
form ; the Zend, in the keeping of the ministers of Zoro- 
aster’s doctrine; the Sanskrit, even yet taught in the Brah- 
manic schools of India, amid the Babel of modern dialects, 
its descendants ; the Latin, the common language of the 
educated through all Europe, for centuries during which 
the later forms of Romanic speech, now the vehicles of a 
culture superior to that of Greece and Rome, were mere 
barbarous patois. Every dialect which is made the subject 
of literary culture is liable to the fate of the Latin; aris- 
tocracy and exclusiveness tend to final overthrow, in lan- 
guage as in politics; the needs and interests of the many 
are more important than those of the few, and must in the 
end prevail. True linguistic conservatism consists in estab- 
lishing an educated and virtuous democracy, in enlisting the 
whole community, by means of a thorough and pervading 
education, in the proper and healthy preservation of the 
accepted usages of correct speech—and then in letting 
whatever change must and will come take its course. There 
is a purism which, while it seeks to maintain the integrity 
of language, in effect stifles its growth: to be too fearful of 
new words and phrases, new meanings, familiar and collo- 
quial expressions, is little less fatal to the well-being of a 
spoken tongue than to rush into the opposite extreme. 

It is hardly needful to point out that these desirable con- 
ditions are much more nearly realized in the case of our 
modern cultivated and literary languages than in those of 
olden time, and that the former have, in all human proba- 
bility, a destiny before them very different from that of the 
latter. In the present constitution of society, among the 
enlightened nations of Europe and America, the forces con- 
pervative of the general purity of language have attained a 


tv. ] LITERARY LANGUAGES. 151 


development and energy to which only a distant approach 
was made under the most favourable circumstances in 
ancient times. The conscious and reflective users of speech, 
the instructed and cultivated, the writers of their thoughts, 
have become everywhere a class powerful in numbers as well 
as dominant in influence. Education, no longer confined 
to the upper layer, more or less pervades the whole mass of 
the people. Books are in every one’s hands, assimilating 
aud establishing the written and spoken usages of all. That 
form of the common speech in each country which has 
enlisted in its support the best minds, the sweetest and most 
sonorous tongues, is ever gaining ground upon the others, 
supplanting their usages, and promising to become and to 
continue the true popular language. 

In America, the influences we have now been considering 
wear a somewhat peculiar form. On the one hand, the 
educated class nowhere else embraces so large a portion of 
the community, or has so vast a collective force; on the 
other hand, and partly for this very reason, the highest and 
best-educated class have less power here than in the less 
democratic countries of the Old World : the low-toned party 
newspaper is too much the type of the prevailing literary 
influence by which the style of speech of our rising gener- 
ation is moulding. A tendency to slang, to colloquial 
inelegancies, and even vulgarities, is the besetting sin 
against which we, as Americans, have especially to guard and 
to struggle. To attain that thorough democracy which is 
the best life and vigour of language, to keep our English 
speech vivid with the thought and feeling of a whole people, 
we should not bring down the tone and style of the highest, 
nor average those of all classes; we should rather lift up the 
lower to the level of the higher. 

Our review of the causes which determine the respective 
part played by the different processes of linguistic growth, 
and the rate at which they severally act, is far from being 
exhaustive. To treat the subject with thoroughness would 
req ure a treatise. Parts of it are of extreme subtlety and 
difficulty. Our attention has been directed almost solely to 
external historical circumstances, those of which the effect 


152 OTHER INFLUENCES AFFECTING THE [ LECT, 


is most easily traced. We have but hinted here and there 
at the more recondite and most potent influences which are 
deep-seated in the individual character of different tongues 
and the qualities of the people who speak them, That 
complex and intricate combination of native capacities and 
dispositions, acquired and inherited habits, and guiding 
circumstances, of which, in each individual community, the 
form and development of the common speech is a product, is 
in no two communities the same, and everywhere requires a 
special and detailed study in order to its comprehension. 
Ethnologists are obliged, in the main, to take the differences 
of national character as ultimate facts, content with setting 
them clearly forth, not claiming to explain them; and a like 
necessity rests upon the linguist as regards linguistic differ- 
ences: not only can he not account for the presence of 
peculiarities of character which determine peculiarities of 
speech, but even their analysis eludes his search; they 
manifest themselves only in these special effects, and are not 
otherwise demonstrable. To ascribe the differences of lan- 
guage and linguistic growth directly to “ physical causes,” to 
make them dependent on “peculiarities of organization,” 
whether cerebral, laryngal, or other, is wholly meaningless 
and futile. Language is not a physical product, but a 
human institution, preserved, perpetuated, and changed, by 
free human action. Nothing but education and habit limits 
any man to the idiom in the possession of which he has grown 
up; within the community of speakers of the same tongue 
may readily be found persons with endowments as unlike, in 
degree and kind, as those which characterize the average men 
of distant and diverse races. Physical causes do, indeed, 
affect language, but only in two ways: first, as they change 
the circumstances to which men have to adapt their speech ; 
and second, as they alter men’s nature and disposition. 
Eyery physical cause requires to be transmuted into a motive 
or a mental tendency, before it can affect the signs by which 
we represent our mental acts. It is universally conceded 
that physical circumstances do produce a permanent effect 
upon the characteristics of race, internal as well as externa), 
and so upon those, among the rest, which govern linguistic 


Iv.] -RATE OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE. 153 


development ; but in what measure, at what rate, and 
through what details of change, is as yet matter of the widest 
diffevence of opinion and the liveliest controversy. There 
are headlong materialists who pronounce man the slave and 
sport of nature, guided and controlled by the external forces 
amid which he exists, and who claim that his history may be 
explained and foretold by means of a knowledge of those 
forces ; when as yet they have not found out even the A-B. 
C of the modes in which human nature is moulded by its 
surroundings, These men have their counterparts also 
among students of language. But, whatever may be hoped 
from the future, it is certain that at present nothing of value 
has been done toward showing how linguistic growth is 
affected in its kind and rate by physical causes. There is no 
human dialect which might not maintain itself essentially 
unaltered in structure, though earried to climes very unlike 
those in which it had grown up, and though employed by a 
people whose culture and mode of life was rapidly varyiag ; 
emigration, often assumed to be the chief and most powerful 
cause of linguistic change, also often appears to exercise a 
conservative influence. And, on the other hand, a language 
may rapidly disintegrate, or undergo phonetic transform- 
ation, or vary the substance of its vocabulary, without moy- 
ing from the region of its origin, or becoming the organ of 
other conditions of human life. When linguistic scholars 
can fully account for such facts as that the Icelandic is thes 
most antique in form of the idioms of its family, that the 
Lithuanian has preserved more of the primitive apparatus of 
Indo-European inflection than any other known tongue of 
modern times, that the Armenian has become with difficult 
recognizable as an Iranian dialect, that the Melanesian, 
African, and American languages are the most changeful of 
human forms of speech—then, perhaps, they may claim to 
comprehend the circumstances that regulate the growth of 
language. 

The variation of language in space, its change from 
one region to another, is a not less obvious fact than its 
variation in time, its change from one epoch to another, 
The earth is filled with almost numberless dialects, differing 


* 


154 CAUSES AFFECTING [ LECT, 


from one another in a greater or less degree, and sone of 
them, at least, we know by historical evidence to be descend- 
ants of a common original. This state of things finds its 
ready and simple explanatioa in the principles which have 
been already laid down; they will demand, therefore, but a 
brief application and further illustration. 

We have been speaking, when treating of the growth of 
language, of vital processes, as going on in the body of 
speech itself, like the process of fermentation in bread, or of 
the displacement and replacement of tissues in an animal 
organism. But we have been careful, at the same time, to 
bear in mind that the word “ process” was thus used only in 
a figurative sense. Every item of change which goes to 
make up the growth of human speech is ultimately a result 
of the conscious effort of human beings. In language, the 
atoms which compose the fermenting mass and the growing 
tissue are not inert matter, acted on by laws of combination 
and aflinity, but intelligent creatures, themselves acting for 
a purpose. A process of linguistic growth, then, is only the 
collective effect, in a given direction, of the acts of a number 
of separate individuals, guided by the preferences, and con- 
trolled by the assent, of the community of which those indi- 
viduals form a part. And upon the jot and reciprocal 
action on language of the individual and the community 
depend all the phenomena of dialectic separation and co- 
alescence. 

For, in the first place, it is evident that the infinite diver- 
sity 43 character and circumstance in the intelligent beings 
who have language in charge must tend to infinite diversity 
in their action and its products. Each independent mind, 
working unrestrainedly according to its own impulses, would 
impress upon the development of speech a somewhat different 
history. It was shown almost at the beginning of our dis- 
cussions (p. 22) that no two men speak exactly the same 
tongue: of course, then, they would not propagate the same. 
Each has his own vocabulary, his own pet words and phrases, 
his own deyiations from the normal standard of pronunciation, 
of construction, of grammar; the needs of each are in some 
ilegree unlike those of others; his mind is somewhat differ. 


Lal 


ty. THE GROWTH OF DIALECTS. 155 


ently impressed and guided by feelings and experiences, 
differen‘ly swayed by the weight of existing analogies. Such 
tendency to variation is, to be sure, within comparatively 
narrow limits; individual speakers of English would not, if 
left to their own devices, rush madly off toward a Choctaw 
or Kamchatkan model of speech; yet its results are by no 
means imperceptible or insignificant ; it is like the variation 
of the separate individuals of a species of plants or animals 
in respect to traits of structure and disposition, which, how- 
ever slow its progress, would finally, if suffered to aceumu- 
late its effects, break up the species into well-marked 
varieties. Linguistic development is thus made up, as we 
may fairly express it, of an infinity of divergent or centrifu- 
gal forces. 

But, in the second place, there is not wanting an effective 
centripetal force also, which holds all the others in check, 
which resolves them, giving value to that part of each which 
makes in a certain direction, and annulling the rest: this 
centripetal force is the necessity of communication. Man 
is no soliloquist: he does not talk for his own diversion and 
edification, but for converse with his fellows ; and that would 
not be language which one individual alone should under- 
stand and be able to employ. Every one is, indeed, as we 
have already seen, engaged in his way and measure in modi- 
fying language; but no one’s action affects the general 
speech, unless it is accepted by others, and ratified in their 
use. Every sign which I utter, I utter by a voluntary effort 
of my organs, over which my will has indefeasible control ; 
I may alter the sign as I please, and to any extent, even to 
that of substituting for it some other wholly new sign; only, 
if by so doing I shock the sense of those about me, or make 
myself unintelligible to them, I defeat the very end for which 
I speak at all. This is the consideration which restrains me 
from arbitrariness and license in the modification of my 
speech, and which makes me exert my individual influence 
upon it only through and by the community of which IT am 
a member. If those who form one community do not talk 
alike, and cannot understand one another, the fundamental 
and essential office of speech is not fulfilled. Hence, whats 


156 CAUSES AFFECTING [ LECT. 


ever changes a language may undergo, they must all be 
shared in by the whole community. The idiosyncrasies, the 
sharp angles and jutting corners, of every man’s idiom must 
be worn off by attrition against those with which it comes in 
contact in the ordinary intercourse of life, that the common 
tongue may become a rounded unit. This does not imply 
an absolute identity of dialect, down to the smallest details, 
among all the constituent members of a community ; within 
certain limits—which, though not strictly definable, are 
sufficiently distinct and coercive to answer their practical 
purpose perfectly well—each one may be as original as he 
pleases: he may push his oddity and obscurity to the very 
verge of the whimsical and the incomprehensible—or even 
beyond it, if he do not mind being misunderstood and 
laughed at; if his sense of his own individuality be so ex- 
aggerated that he is a whole community, a world, to himself. 
Nor must the word community, as used with reference to 
language, be taken in a too restricted or definite sense. It 
has various degrees of extension, and bounds within bounds: 
the same person may belong to more than one community, 
using in each a different idiom. For instance: I have, as 
we may suppose, a kind of home dialect, containing a certain 
proportion of baby-talk, and a larger of favourite colloquial- 
isms, which would sound a little queerly, if they were not 
unintelligible, to any one outside of my family circle ; as an 
artisan, pursuing a special branch of manufacture or trade, 
or as one engaged in a particular profession, or study, or 
department of art, I am a member of another community, 
speaking a language to some extent peculiar, and which 
would be understood neither by my wife and children nor 
by the majority of speakers of English. Thus, I may have 
dived deep into the mysteries of some scheme of tran- 
scendental philosophy, or searched and pondered the ulti- 
mate physical constitution of atoms; and, if I should dis- 
course to a general audience of that which to me is full of 
profoundest significance and interest, while one out of 
twenty, perhaps, would follow me with admiring apprecia- 
tion, to the other nineteen I should seem an incomprehensi- 
ble ranter. But even as a general speaker of English, 


Iv. ] THE GROWTH OF DIALECTS. 157 


qualified to met and converse intelligently with others who 
claim the same title, upon matters of import to us all, I 
may have my speech marked more or less strongly with 
local or personal peculiarities ; it may exhibit unusual tones 
of utterance, or unusual turns of phrase, which, if I would 
be readily and thoroughly understood, I must endeavour to 
avoid. Now all these differences of speech, limited as their 
range may be, are in their essential nature dialectic; the 
distinction between such idioms, as we may properly style 
them, and well-marked dialects, or related but independent 
languages, is one, not of kind, but only of degree. For I 
also possess a considerable portion of my language in com- 
mon with the Netherlander, the German, and the Swede, to 
say nothing of my remoter relations, the Russian, the Per- 
sian, and the Hindu; and if, in talking with any one of 
them, I could only, manage to leaye out of ny conversation 
such words as belong to my dialect alone, and moreover, not 
to pronounce the rest with such a local peculiarity of tone, 
nor give them such special shades of meaning, he and I 
might get along together famously, each of us understanding 
all the other said. JI can, indeed, make ealeulations and 
compose mathematical formulas with him all day long; or, if 
we are chemists, we can compare our views as to the consti- 
tution of all substances, organic and inorganic, to our mu- 
tual edification; since, as regards their mathematical and 
chemical language, their systems of notation and nomen- 
clature, all who share European civilization form but a single 
community. 

There is room, then, for all that diversity which was shown 
in our first lecture to belong to the speech of different indi- 
viduals and different classes in the same community, along 
with that general correspondence which makes them speakers 
of the same language. The influence of community works 
in various degrees, and within various limits, according to 
the nature and extent of the community by which it is 
exercised. The whim of a child and the assent of its 
parents may make a change in the family idiom; the con- 
sent of all the artisans in a certain branch of mechanical 
iabour is enough to give a new term the right to stand in 


158 CAUSES AFFECTING [ LECT. 


their tec.:nical vocabulary ; the majority of good writers and 
speakers of English is the only authority which can make 
a word good Engiish in the part of our tongue that we all 
alike use and value; while all the learned of Europe must 
join together, in order to alter the notation of a number, or 
the symbol of a chemical element. But the principle is 
everywhere the same: as mutual intelligibility is the bond 
which makes the unity of a language, so the necessity: of 
mutual intelligibility is the power which preserves and per- 
petuates that unity. 

If communication is thus the assimilating force which 
averages and harmonizes the effects of discordant individual 
action on language, keeping it, notwithstanding its incessant 
changes, the same to all the members of the same community, 
then it is clear that everything which narrows communica- 
tion, and tends to the isolation of communities, favours the 
separation of a language into dialects; while all that extends 
communication, and strengthens the ties which bind together 
the parts of a community, tends to preserve the homogeneity 
of speech. Suppose a race, occupying a certain tract of 
country, to possess a single tongue, which all understand 
and use alike: then, so long as the race is confined within 
narrow limits, however rapidly its language may yield to the 
irresistible forces which produce linguistic growth, all will 
learn from each, and each from all; and, from generation to 
generation, every man will understand his neighbour, what- 
ever difficulty he might find in conversing with the spirit of 
his great-grandfather, or some yet remoter ancestor. But if 
the race grows in numbers, spreading itself over region after 
region, sending out colonies to distant lands, its uniformity 
of speech is exposed to serious danger, and can only be saved 
by specially favouring circumstances and conditions. And 
these conditions are yet more exclusively of an external 
character than those which, as we lately saw, determine the 
mode and rate of linguistic change in general: they consist 
mainly in the kind and degree of culture enjoyed and the 
effects which this naturally produces. In a iow state of 
civilization, the maintenance of community over a wide 
extent of country is altogether impracticable; the tendency 


iv.] THE GROWTH OF DIALECTS. 159 


to segregation is paramount; local and clannish feeling 
prevails, stifling the growth of any wider and nobler 
sense of national unity and common interests; each little 
tribe or section is jealous of and dreads the rest; the 
struggle for existence arrays them in hostility against each 
other; or, at the best, the means of constant and thorough 
communication among individuals of the different parts of 
the country is wanting, along with the feelings which should 
impel to it. Thus all the diversifying tendencies are left to 
run their course unchecked; varieties of circumstance and 
experience, the subtler and more indirect influences of 
climate and mode of life, the yet more undefinable agencies 
which have their root in individual and national caprice, 
gradually accumulate their discordant effects about separate 
centres, and local varieties of speech arise, which grow into 
dialects, and these into distinct and, finally, widely dissimilar 
languages. The rate at which this separation will go on 
depends, of course, in no small degree, upon the general 
rate of change of the common speech; as the dialects can 
only become different by growing apart, a sluggishness of 
growth will keep them longer together—and that, not by its 
direct operation alone, but also by giving the weak forces of 
an imperfect and scanty communication opportunity to work 
more effectively in counteraction of the others. Thus all 
the influences which have already been referred to as re- 
stricting the variation of a language from generation to 
generation are, as such, equally effective in checking its 
variation from portion to portion of a people. But the 
most important of them also contribute to the same result 
in another way, by directly strengthening and extending the 
bonds of community. Culture and enlightenment give a 
wonderful cohesive force; they render possible a wide po- 
litical unity, maintenance of the same institutions, govern- 
ment under the same laws; they facilitate community of 
memories and traditions, and foster nations! feeling; they 
create the wants and tastes which lead the people of differ- 
ent regions to mix with and aid one another, and they 
furnish the means of ready and frequent intercourse: all of 
which make powerfully for linguistic unity also. A tra 


\ 


160 CAUSES BRINGING ABOUT [ LECT. 


ditional literature, sacred or heroic, tends effectively in the 
same direction. But of more account than all is a written 
literature, and an organized and pervading system of in- 
struction, whereby the same expressions for thought, feel- 
ing, and experience are set as models before the eyes of all, 
ang the most far-reaching and effective style of linguistic 
communication is established. 

Moreover, that same necessity of mutual understanding 
which makes and preserves the identity of language through- 
out a community has power also to bring forth identity out 
of diversity. No necessary and indissoluble tie binds any 
human being to his own personal and local peculiarities of 
idiom, or even to his mother-tongue ; habit and convenience 
alone make them his; he is ever ready to give them up for 
others, when circumstances make it worth his while to do so. 
The coarse and broad-mouthed rustic whom the force of 
inborn character and talent brings up to a position among 
cultivated men, wears off the rudeness of his native dialect, 
and learns to speak as correctly and elegantly, perhaps, as 
one who has been trained from his birth after the best 
models. Those who come up from among the dialects of 
every part of Britain to seek their fortune in the metropolis 
acquire some one of the forms of English speech which 
flourish there ; and, even if they themselves are unable ever 
to rid themselves wholly of provincialisms, their children 
may grow up as thorough cockneys as if their families had 
never lived out of hearing of Bow bells. Any one of us who 
goes to a foreign land and settles there, identifying himself 
with a community of strange speech, learns to talk with 
them, as well as his previously formed habits will let him, 
and between his descendants and theirs there will be no 
difference of language, however unlike they may be in hue 
and feature. If adventurers of various race and tongue 
combine themselves together in a colony and take up their 
abode in some wild country, their speech at once begins to 
undergo a process of assimilation, which sooner or later 
makes it one and homogeneous : how rapidly this end shall 
be attained, and whether some one element shall absorb the 
rest, or whether all shall contribute equally to the resuiting 


_ 


Iv. ] ASSIMILATION OF DIALECTS. 161 


dialect, must be determined by the special circumstances of 
the case. Of the multitudes of Germans whom emigration 
brings to our shores, some establish themselves together in 
considerable numbers: they cover with their settlements a 
tract in the West, or fill a quarter in sume of our large 
towns and cities. They form, then, a kind of community of 
their own, in the midst of the greater community which 
surrounds them, having numerous points of contact with 
the latter, but not absorbed into its structure: there are 
enough speakers of English among them to furnish all the 
means of communication with the world about them which 
they need; they are proud of their German nationality and 
cling to it; they have their own schools, papers, books, 
preachers—and their language, though sure to yield finally 
to the assimilating influences which surround it, may be 
kept up, possibly, for generations. So also with a crowd of 
Trish, clustered together in a village or suburb, breeding in 
and in, deriving their scanty instruction from special schools 
under priestly care: their characteristic brogue and other 
peculiarities of word and phrase may have an indefinite lease 
of life. But, on the other hand, families of foreign nation- 
ality scattered in less numbers among us can make no 
effective resistance to the force which tends to identify them 
thoroughly with the community of English speakers, and 
their language is soon given up for ours. 

There is evidently no limit to the scale upon which such 
fusion and assimilation of speech may go on. The same 
causes which lead an individual, or family, or group of fami- 
lies, to learn and use another tongue than that which they 
themselves or their fathers have been accustomed to speak, 
may be by historical circumstances made operative through- 
out a whole class, or over a whole region. When two com- 
munities are combined into one, there comes to be but one 
language where before there were two. A multiplication and 
strengthening of the ties which bind together the different 
sections of one people tends directly toward the effacement 
of already existing varieties of dialect, and the production of 
linguistic uniformity. 

Such effacement ard assimilation of dialectic varieties, net 

li 


162 HISTORY OF THE [ LECT. 


less than dissimilation and the formation of new dialects, are 
all the time going on in human communities, according as 
conditions favour the one or the other class of effects; and a 
due consideration of both is necessary, if we would compre- 
hend the history of any tongue, or family of tongues. Let 
us look at one or two examples, which shall serve to illus- 
trate their jomt and mutual workings,*and to set forth 
more clearly the truth of the principles we have laid down. 
We will consider first the history of that one among the 
prominent literary languages of the present day which has 
most recently attained its position, namely the German. 
From the earliest dawn of history, Germany has been filled 
with a multitude of more or less discordant dialects, each 
occupying its own limited territory, and no one of them 
better entitled than any other to set itself up as the norm 
of correct German speech. How far back their separation 
goes, it is impossible to tell; whence, when, and how the 
first Germanic tribe entered central Europe, that its tongue 
might become there the mother of so many languages, crowd- 
ing Germany and Scandinavia, and spreading, through Eng- 
land, even to the shores and prairies of a new world; or 
whether the beginnings of dialectic division were made before 
the entrance of the race into its present seats—these are 
secrets which will never be fully disclosed. There were 
sweeping changes in the range and character of the Ger- 
manic dialects during those ages of migration and strife 
when Germany and Rome were carrying on their life and 
death struggle. Whole branches of the German race, among 
them some of the most renowned and mighty, as the Goths 
and Vandals, wholly lost their existence as separate com- 
munities, being scattered and absorbed into other com- 
munities, and their languages also ceased to exist. Leagues 
and migrations, intestine struggles and foreign conquests, 
produced fusions and absorptions, extensions, contractions, 
and extinctions, in manifold variety ; but without any 
tendency to a general unity: and three centuries and a half 
ago, when the modern German first put forth its claim to 
stand as the common language of Germany, there was in 
that country the same Babel of discordant speech as at the 


Iv. | GERMAN LANGUAGE. 163 


Christian era. Since the introduction of Christianity and 
the beginnings of civilization, more than one of the High- 
German dialects, as they are called, the dialects of central 
and southern Germany, had been for a season the subject 
of literary culture. This was the case with the idioms, in 
succession, of the Alemannic, Frankish, and Bavarian divi- 
sions of the race, between the seventh and the thirteenth 
centuries ; then, for a time, the Swabian dialect gained the 
preéminence, and in it was produced arich and noble legend- 
ary literature, containing precious memorials of national 
heroic story, and still studied and valued wherever the Ger- 
man tongue is spoken. Here was a promising beginning for 
a truly national language, but the conditions of the times 
were not yet such as to give the movement lasting and assured 
success. Three centuries later began the grand national up- 
heaval of the Reformation. The writings of Luther, multi. 
plied and armed with a hundred-fold force by the new art of 
printing, penetrated to all parts of the land, and to nearly 
all ranks and classes of the people, awakening everywhere a 
vivid enthusiasm. The language he used was not the local 
dialect of a district, but one which had already a better 
claim than any other to the character of a general German 
language : it was the court and official speech of the principal 
kingdoms of central and southern Germany, made up of 
Swabian, Austrian, and other dialectic elements.* To a lan- 
guage so accredited, the internal impulse of the religious 
excitement and the political revolutions accompanying it, 
and the external influence of the press, which brought its 
literature, and especially Luther’s translation of the Bible, 
into every reading family, were enough to give a common 
currency, a general value. It was set before the eyes of the 
whole nation as the most cultivated form of German speech ; 
it was acknowledged and accepted as the dialect of highest 
rank, the only fitting organ of communication among the 
educated and refined. From that time to the present, its 
influence and power have gone on increasing. It is the 
vehicle of literature and instruction everywhere. Whatever 
may be the speech of the lower classes in any section, the 
* See Schleicher, oes Sprache, p. 107 seq. 


164 THE GERMAN LANGUAGE. [ LECT, 


educated, those who make up good society, speak the 
literary German; their children are trained in it; nothing 
else is written. The popular dialects are still as numerous 
as ever, because education is not pervading and thorough 
enough to extirpate them ; and their existence may be pro- 
longed for an indefinite period; but the literary language 
exercises a powerfully repressing and assimilating effect 
upon them all; it has lessened their rank and lowered their 
character, by withdrawing from them in great measure the 
countenance and aid of the cultivated ; it has leavened them 
all with its material and its usages; and it may finally 
succeed in crowding them altogether out of use. Its sway 
extends just as far as the external influences which estab- 
lished it reach: it is not confined to the territory occupied 
by the High-German dialects, its nearest kindred; the 
people of the northern provinces also, speaking tongues of 
Low-German descent, which are much more nearly related 
with the Netherlandish, or even with the English, are drawn 
by the ties of political, social, and religious community with 
the rest of Germany to accept and use it. While, on the 
other hand, political independence, aided by diversity of 
social and religious usages, has given a separate existence 
as a literary language to the Dutch or Netherlandish, and 
yet more notably to the English, descendants of dialects 
originally undistinguished among the crowd of Low-German 
idioms which lined: the shores of the North Sea. 

The history of most other literary languages is of the 
same character with that which we have just been examin- 
ing. Each was, at the outset, one out of a number of kin- 
dred but more or less diverse forms of speech, and the 
predominance which it came to gain over them was the re- 
sult, not of its inherent merits as an instrument of thought 
and means of communication, but of outward circumstances, 
which made its usages worth the acquisition of a wider and 
wider community. Thus the parent language of the modern 
French was the vernacular speech of only a small part of 
the population of France; and it long had a rival, and 
almost a superior, in the early and highly cultivated dialect 
of southern France, the Provencal, or langue doc; nor, 


7 
OO 


Iv. | THE LATIN LANGUAGS. 165 


if the kingdom of Toulouse had maintained itself, would the 
latter ever have yielded to the former: but the sceptre of 
political supremacy over all France passed into the keep- 
ing of the northern provinces, and their speech became 
the rule of good usage throughout the land, while the 
langue doc lost by degrees its character as a cultivated 
dialect, and survives only in rude and insignificant provincial 
patois. The Italian was, in like manner, the popular idiom 
only of Tuscany, one of the innumerable local dialects which 
crowd and jostle one another between the Alps and Sicily, 
and its currency among the educated classes of the whole 
peninsula is the effect of literary influence and of instruc- 
tion. 

An illustration of a somewhat different character is 
afforded us by the history of the Latin, a history in many 
respects more remarkable than that of any other language 
which has ever existed. This conquering tongue—whose 
descendants now occupy so large and fair a part of Europe, 
and, along with their half-sister, the English, fill nearly all 
the New World, and numerous scattered tracts, coasts, and 
islands, on every continent and in every ocean, while its 
material has leavened and enriched the speech of all enlight- 
ened nations—was the vernacular idiom, not twenty-five 
centuries ago, of a little isolated district im middle Italy, a 
region which, on any map of the world not drawn upon a 
scale truly gigantic, one might easily cover with the end ofa 
finger. How and when it came there, we know not; but it 
was one of a group of related dialects, descendants and joint 
representatives of an older tongue, spoken by the first 
immigrants, which had grown apart by the effect of the usual 
dissimilating processes. Remains of at least two of these 
sister dialects, the Oscan and the Umbrian, are still left in 
existence, to exercise the ingenuity of the learned, and to 
illustrate the ante-historic period of Italic speech. The 
Latin was pressed on the north by the Etruscan, and threat- 
ened from the south by the Greek, languages of much more 
powerful races, and the latter of them possessing a higher 
intrinsic character, and an infinitely superior cultivation: no 
one could then have dared to guess that its after career 


166 HISTORY OF THE [ LECT. 


would be so much more conspicuous than theirs. Its spread 
began with the extension of Roman dominion, and was the 
plainest and most unequivocal sign of the thorough and 
penetrating nature of that dominion. Not content with the 
loose and nominal sway which the Persian sovereign exer- 
cised over the heterogeneous parts of his vast empire, or the 
yet laxer authority of the modern Mongol rulers over 
their wider conquests, the Romans infused, as it were, a new 
organic life into the vast body corporate of which they were 
the head, and made their influence felt through its every 
nerve and fibre. Italy they first subjected and Romanized. 
The yoke they imposed, and riveted by their military colonies, 
their laws and institutions, their culture, and their all-pene- 
trating administration, was a bond of community against 
which no other proved able to maintain itself; all the lan- 
guages of the peninsula, from the Gaulish of the north to 
the Greek of the extreme south, gave way by degrees before 
the tongue of the conquering city, and Italy became a 
country of one uniform speech. And yet not wholly 
uniform: relies of the ancient languages maintained them- 
selves for a long time in certain more inaccessible districts, 
and their influence was doubtless to be distinctly seen in the 
varying local dialects of the different parts of the peninsula 
—as, indeed, traces of it are even now discoverable there. 
The common speech of Italy, too, setting aside these dia- 
lectic distinctions, was not the pure polished Latin of Cicero 
and Virgil, but a ruder idiom, containing already the germs 
of many of the changes exhibited by the modern Italian and 
the other Romanic tongues. The same process of conquest 
and incorporation into the Roman community was carried 
farther, upon a grand and surprising scale, into the other 
countries of Europe. The Celts of Gaul, the Celts and 
Iberians of Spain, gave up their own languages and adopted 
that of their rulers and civilizers, not less completely than 
have the Celts of Ireland, within the last few centuries, 
exchanged their Irish speech for English: of Celtic words 
and usages only scanty and unimportant traces are to be 
found in the modern French and Spanish. The same fate 
threatened Germany, had not her brave and hardy tribes 


Iv.] LATIN LANGUAGE. 167 


offered too stubborn a resistance to the already waning 
forces of the empire; and Britain also, had not its remote 
situation and inferior value as a province caused the Roman 
hold upon it to be weak, and soon abandoned. Less con- 
siderable tracts of south-eastern Europe, stretching from the 
northern border of Italy to near the mouth of the Danube, 
yielded to the same influence: subdued by the arms, colo- 
nized from the population, organized by the policy, civilized 
by the culture, of the great city, they learned also to talk 
her language, forgetting their own. Thus arose the great 
and important group of the Romanic languages, as they are 
called; namely, the Italian, the French, the Spanish and 
Portuguese, the Rheto-Romanic of southern Switzerland, and 
the Wallachian—each including a host of varying dialects, 
all lineal descendants of the Latin, all spoken by populations 
only in small part of Latin race. 

We must uot suppose, however, that a pure and classical 
Latin was ever the popular dialect of this wide-extended 
region of Europe, any more than of Italy after its first 
Romanization. The same counteracting causes, acting on a 
grander scale and with an intensified force, prevented cor- 
rectness and homogeneity of speech. The populace got their 
Latin rather from the army and its followers, the colonists 
and low officials, than from educated Romans and the works 
of great authors. Doubtless there was not at first such a 
difference between the dialect of the highest and of the 
lowest that they could not understand one another. But, 
whatever it was, it rapidly became wiler: while study and 
the imitation of unchanging models kept the scholars and 
ecclesiastics in possession of the classical Latin, only a little 
barbarized by the irresistible intrusion into it of words and 
constructions borrowed from vernacular use, the language of 
the masses grew rapidly away from it, breaking up at the 
same time into those innumerable local forms to whose exist- 
ence we have already referred. There was no conserving and 
assimilating influence at work among the millions who had 
taken for their own the language of Rome, capable either of 
binding them fast to its established usages or of keeping 
their lines of linguistic growth parallel. Special disturbing 


168 DESCENDANTS OF THE LATIN. [ LECT. 


forces came in here and there. Incursions and conquests of 
German tribes brought an element of Germanic speech into 
the tongues alike of Spain, France, and Italy. Centuries of 
Saracen domination engrafted upon the Spanish language a 
notable store of words of Arabic derivation. When, at 
length, the dark ages of European history were over, and 
knowledge and culture were to be taken out of the exclusive 
custody of the few, and made the wealth and blessing of the 
many, tne Latin was a dead language, much too far removed 
from popular wants and sympathies to be able to serve the 
needs of the new nations. Hence the rise in each separate 
country, at not far from the same time, of a new national 
tongue, to be the instrument and expression of the national 
culture. All Romanized Europe was in the condition already 
described as that of Germany prior to the advancement of the 
modern German to its present position; a chaos of varying 
dialects was there; and, in every case, external historical 
circumstances determined which of them should attain a 
higher value, and should subject and absorb the rest. 

In all this alternate and repeated divergence and converg- 
ence of dialects there is evidently nothing which needs to be 
looked upon as mysterious, or even puzzling. Such has been 
the history of language from the beginning, and in all parts 
of the earth. We need only the tendency of individual 
language to vary, and the effect of community to check, 
limit, and even reverse this tendency, in order to explain 
every case that arises: the peculiar conditions of each case 
must decide whether their joint action shall, on the whole, 
make for homogeneity or for diversity of speech; and the 
result, in kind and in degree, will vary according to the sum 
of the causes which produced it; as the resultant motion, in 
rate and direction, combines and represents all the forces, 
however various and conflicting, of whose united action it is 
the effect. 

Thus, as has been already pointed out, when there takes 
place a fusion of two communities, larger or smaller, of 
varying speech, no general law can determine what shall be 
the resulting dialect. When the Romans conquered Gaul, 
although forming only a minority of the population, they 


Iv. | TRANSFER OF LANGUAGES. 169 


almost totally obliterated the Gaulish speech, putting the 
Latin in its place, for they brought with them culture and 
polity, art and science, learning and letters: they made it 
better worth while for the Celts to learn Latin than to 
adhere to their own ancient idiom. When, however, the 
Germanic Franks, a few centuries later, conquered in their 
turn the now Latinized Gaul, and turned it into a kingdom 
of France, they adopted the language of their more numer- 
ous and more cultivated subjects, only adding a small per- 
centage of Germanic words to its vocabulary, and perhaps 
contributing an appreciable influence toward hastening the 
decay, already well in progress, of the Latin grammatical 
system. The same thing happened once more, when the 
Scandinavian Northmen, representing another branch of the 
Germanic family, after extorting from the beaten and trem- 
bling monarchs of France the cession of one of her fairest 
provinces, became the not less formidable and dreaded Nor- 
mans. Although placed in seemingly favourable circum- 
stances for conserving their linguistic independence, crowded 
together as they were within comparatively narrow bounds, 
and making on their own ground, of which they were 
absolute masters, the majority of the population, they yet 
could not resist the powerful assimilating influences which 
pressed them, a horde of uncouth and unlearned barbarians, 
on every side. Within a wonderfully short time, their 
Norse tongue had altogether gone out of use, leaving traces 
only in a few geographical names: along with French man- 
ners, French learning, and French polity, they had implicitly 
adopted also French speech. Hardly was this conversion 
accomplished, when they set forth to propagate their new 
linguistic faith in a country occupied by dialects akin with 
that which they had recently forsworn. The Angles and 
Saxons, Germanic tribes, had meantime finished the task, 
only begun by the Romans, of extirpating upon the largest 
and best part of British ground the old Celtic speech. They 
had done it in a somewhat different way, by sheer brute 
force, by destroying, enslaving, or driving out the native 
population, and filling all but the most inaccessible regions 
of the island with their own ferocious tribesmen. Hence 


170 HISTORY OF THE [LEoT. 


the wholly insignificant remains of Celtic material to be 
found among the ordinary stores of expression of our English 
tongue. Christianity and civilization found the invaders in 
their new home, and an Anglo-Saxon literature grew up, 
which, had circumstances continued favourable, might have 
aided national unity of government, institutions, and culture 
to assimilate the varying dialects of the country, producing 
a national language not inferior in wealth and polish to our 
present speech. But they who take the sword shall perish 
by the sword: upon the Anglo-Saxons were wreaked the 
woes they had themselves earlier brought upon the Celts. 
Danish and Norse invasions, during a long period, bitterly 
vexed and weakened the Saxon state, and it finally sank 
irrecoverably under the Norman conquest. This time, the 
collision of two diverse languages, upborne by a nearly 
equal civilization—the partial superiority of that of the 
Normans being more than counterbalanced by their in- 
feriority in numbers—under the government of political 
circumstances already explained, produced a result different 
from any which we have thus far had occasion to notice— 
namely, a truly composite language, drawing its material and 
its strength in so nearly equal part from the two sources 
that scholars are able to dispute whether the modern English 
is more Saxon or more French. Into the details of the 
combination we cannot now stay to enter, but must pass 
on to note the later dialectic history of the language, 
merely directing attention to the important and familiarly 
known fact that its formative apparatus—whether consisting 
in inflections, affixes of derivation, or connectives and rela- 
tional words—along with the most common and indispensable 
part of its vocabulary, remained almost purely Saxon, so 
that it is to be accounted still a Germanic dialect in struc- 
ture, although furnished with stores of expression in no 
small part of Romanic origin, 

The fusion of Saxon and Norman elements in English 
speech did not reach in equal measure all parts of the land 
or all classes of the people, nor did it by any means wipe 
out previously existing dialectie differences, thus furnishing 
a new and strictly homogeneous speech as a starting-point 


Iv. ] ENGLISH LANGUAGE. i71 


whence a new process of dialectic divergence should com. 
mence. On the contrary, Britain is still, like Germany, 
only in a less degree, a country full of dialects, some of 
whose peculiarities go back to the diversities of speech 
among the tribes by whom the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the 
island was achieved, thirteen hundred years ago, while the 
rest are of every date of origin, from that remote period to 
the present. One or two of these dialects—especially the 
Scottish and the Yorkshire—poetry and fiction have made 
somewhat familiarly known to us; others are matters of 
keen and curious interest to the student of language, their 
testimony being hardly less essential than that of the literary 
dialect to his comprehension of the history of English 
speech. 

But it was impossible that, in the transfer of English to 
the continent of America, these local dialects should main- 
tain themselves intact; that could only have been the result 
of a separate migration of parts of the local communities to 
which they belonged, and of the continued maintenance of 
their distinct identity in their new place of settlement. 
Such was not the character of the movement which filled 
this country with an English-speaking population. Old 
lines of local division were effaced ; new ties of community 
were formed, embracing men of various province and rank. 
It was not more inevitable that the languages of the various 
nationalities which have contributed to our later population 
should disappear, swallowed up in the predominant English, 
than that the varying forms of English should disappear, 
being assimilated to that one among them which was better 
supported than the rest. Nor could it be doubtful which 
was the predominant element, to which the others would 
have to conform themselves. In any cultivated and lettered 
community, the cultivated speech, the language of letters, is 
the central point toward which all the rest gravitate, as they 
are broken up and lose their local hold. And our first 
settlers were in no small part from the instructed class, men 
of high character, capacity, and culture. They brought with 
them a written language and a rich literature ; they read 
and wrote; they established schools of every grade, and 


172 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE [LEOT, 


took care that each rising generation should not fall behind 
its predecessor in learning. The basis, too, of equality of 
rights and privileges on which they founded their society 
added a powerful influence in favour of equality of speech. 
As a natural and unavoidable consequence, then, of these 
determining conditions, and not by reason of any virtue for 
which we are to take credit to ourselves, the general lan- 
guage of America, through all sections of the country and 
all orders of the population, became far more nearly homo- 
geneous, and accordant with the correct standard of English 
speech, than is the average language of England. And the 
same influences which made it so have tended to keep it so: 
the democratic character of our institutions, and the almost 
universality of instruction among us, have done much to 
maintain throughout our community an approximate uni- 
formity of idiom. There was doubtless never a country 
before, where, down to the very humblest classes of the 
people, so many learned to read and spell out of the same 
school-books, heard the same speakers, from platform, desk, 
and pulpit, and read the same books and papers; where 
there was such a surging to and fro of the population, such 
a mixture and intimate intercourse of all ranks and of all 
regions. In short, every form of communication is more 
active and more far-reaching with us than ever elsewhere ; 
every assimilating influence has had unequalled freedom and 
range of action. Hence, there was also never a case in 
which so nearly the same language was spoken throughout 
the whole mass of so vast a population as is the English now 
in America. Modern civilization, with the great states it 
creates, and the wide and active intercourse among men to 
which it prompts and for which it affords the needed facili- 
ties, is able to establish upon unoccupied soil, and then to 
maintain there, community upon a scale of grandeur to 
which ancient times could afford no parallel. 

Nor have we failed to keep nearly even pace with our 
British relations in the slow progressive development of the 
common tongue: our close connection with the mother- 
country, the community of culture which we have kept up 
wih her, our acknowledgment of her superior authority in 


rv. | IN AMHRICA. 172 


matters of learning and literature, have been able thus far 
to restrain our tespective lines of linguistic growth from 
notable divergence. Though we are sundered by an ocean, 
there have been invisible ties enough between us to bind us 
together into one community. Yet our concordance of 
speech is not perfect: British purism finds fault with even 
our higher styles of discourse, oral and written, as disfigured 
by Americanisms, and in both the tone and the material of 
colloquial talk the differences are, of course, much more 
marked. We have preserved some older words, phrases, 
and meanings which their modern use discards; we have 
failed as yet to adopt certain others which have sprung up 
among them since the separation; we have originated yet 
others which they have not accepted and ratified. Upon 
all these points we are, in the abstract, precisely as much in 
the right as they; but the practical question is, which of 
the two is the higher authority, whose approved usage shall 
be the norm of correct English speaking. We have been 
content hitherto to accept the inferior position, but it is not 
likely that we shall always continue so. Our increasing 
numbers and our growing independence of character and 
culture will give us in our own estimation an equal right, at 
the least, and we shall feel more and more unwilling to yield 
implicitly to British precedent ; so that the time may perhaps 
come when the English language in America and the English 
language in Britain will exhibit a noteworthy difference of 
material, form, and usage. What we have to rely upon to 
counteract this separating tendency and annul its effect is 
the predominating influence of the class of highest cultiva- 
tion, as exerted especially through the medium of literature. 
Literature is the most dignified, the most legitimate, and 
the most powerful of the forces which effect the conservation 
of language, and the one which acts most purely according 
to its true merit, free from the adventitious aids and draw- 
backs of place and time. It is through her literature that 
America has begun, and must go on, to win her right to 
share in the elaboration of the English speech. Love and 
admiration of the same master-works in poetry, oratory, 
philosophy, and science has hitherto made one community 


174 THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA. [LECT, 


of the two great divisions of speakers of English, and ought 
to continue to unite them—and it will, we hope, do so: but 
more or less completely, according as that portion of the 
community which is most directly reached and effectively - 
guided by literature is allowed authority over the rest. 

We are, however, by no means free from dialects among our 
own population, although we may hope that they will long, 
or always, continue to be restricted within narrow limits of 
variation from the standard of correct speech, as they are at 
present. The New Englander, the Westerner, the South- 
erner, even of the educated class, betrays his birth to a 
skilled observer by the peculiarities of his language ; and 
the lower we descend in the social scale, the more marked 
and prominent do these peculiarities become. There is 
hardly a locality in the land, of greater or less extent, which 
has not some local usages, of phrase or utterance, character- 
izing those whose provincialism has not been rubbed off by 
instruction or by intercourse with a wider public. There is 
a certain degree of difference, too, of which we are all 
conscious, between the written and the colloquial style : 
there are words and phrases in good conversational use, 
which would be called inelegant, and almost low, if met 
with in books; there are words and phrases whieh we em- 
ploy in composition, but which would seem forced and stilted 
if applied in the ordinary dealings of life. This is far from 
being a difference sufficient to mark the literary English as 
another dialect than that of the people ; yet it is the begin- 
ning of such a difference; it needs no change in kind, but 
only a change in degree, to make it accord with the distinc. 
tion between any literary language which history offers to 
our knowledge and the less cultivated dialects which have 
grown up in popular usage by its side, and by which it has 
been finally overthrown and supplanted. 

Nothing, then, as we see, can absolutely repress dialectic 
growth; even the influences most powerfully conservative 
of identity of langnage, working in the most effective 
manner which human conditions have been found to admit, 
can only succeed in indefinitely reducing its rate of pro« 
gress, 


Iv. | LANGUAGES AND DIALECTS. 175 


Tt will be noticed that we have used the terms “ dialect’’ 
and “language ’”’ indifferently and interchangeably, in speak- 
ing of any given tongue; and it will also have been made 
plain, I trust, by the foregoing exposition how vain would 
be the attempt to establish a definite and essential distine- 
tion between them, or give precision to any of the other 
names which indicate the different degrees of diversity 
among related tongues. No form of speech, living or dead, 
of which we have any knowledge, was not or is not a dialect, 
in the sense of being the idiom of a limited community, 
among other communities of kindred but somewhat discord- 
ant idiom ; none is not truly a Janguage, in the sense that 
it is the means of mutual intercourse of a distinct portion 
of mankind, adapted to their capacity and supplying their 
needs. The whole history of spoken language, in all climes 
and all ages, is a series of varying and successive phases ; 
external circumstances, often accidental, give to some of these 
phases a prominence and importance, a currency and per- 
manence, to which others do not attain; and according to 
their degree of importance we style them idiom, or patois, 
or dialect, or language. To a very limited extent, natural 
history feels the same difficulty in establishing the distinc- 
tion between a “ variety ” and a “species: and the difficulty 
would be not less pervading and insurmountable in natural 
than in linguistic science, if, as is the case in language, not 
only the species, but even the genera and higher groups of 
animals and plants were traceably descended from one 
another or from common ancestors, and passed into each 
other by insensible gradations. Transmutation of species in 
the kingdom of speech is no hypothesis, but a patent fact, 
one of the fundamental and determining principles of lin- 
guistic study. 


LECTURE V. 


Erroneous views of the relations of dialects. Dialectic variety implies 
original unity. Effect of cultivation on a language. Grouping of lan- 
guages by relationship. Nearer and remoter relations of the English. 
Constitution of the Indo-European family. Proof of its unity. Im- 
possibility of determining the place and time of its founders; their 
culture and customs, inferred from their restored vocabulary. 


Havine previously considered in some detail the various 
modes of change in language—the processes of linguistic 
life, as, by an allowable figure, we termed them—we went 
on at our last interview to direct our attention to the cireum- 
stances and conditions which govern the working of those 
processes, giving prominence to the one or the other of them, 
and quickening or retarding their joint effects. We then 
proceeded to inquire into the manner in which the same 
processes operate to divide any given form of speech, with 
the lapse of time, into varying forms, or to convert a lan- 
guage into dialects. We passed in review the causes which 
favour the development of dialectic differences, as well as 
those which limit and oppose such development, and even 
tend to bring uniformity out of diversity. They are, we 
found, of two general kinds: the one, proceeding from indi- 
viduals, and founded on the diversities of individual char- 
acter and circumstance, tend to indefinite separation and 
ciscordance ; the other, acting in communities, and arising 
froin the necessity of mutual intelligence, the grand aim and 
purpose of language, make for uniformity and assimilation, 


v. | DIALECTS NOT PRIMITIVE. 177 


sacrificing a merely personal to a more comprehensive unity, 
merging the individual in the society of which he is a 
“member. Language is an institution founded in man’s social 
nature, wrougit out for the satisfaction of his social wants ; 
and hence, while individuals are the sole ultimate agents in 
the formation and modification of every word and meaning 
of a word, it is ‘still the community that makes and changes 
its language. The one is the molecular force ; the other, the 
organic. Both, as we saw, are always at work, and the history 
of human tongues is a record of their combined effects ; but 
the individual diversifying forces lie deeper down, are more 
internal, more inherent in the universal use of speech, and 
removed from the control of outward circumstances. Lan- 
guage, we may fairly say, tends toward diversity, but circum- 
stances connected with its employment check, annul, and 
even reverse this tendency, preserving unity, or producing 
it where it did not before exist, 

One or two recent writers upon language * have com- 
mitted the very serious error of inverting the mutual rela- 
tions of dialectic variety and uniformity of speech, thus turn- 
ing topsy-turvy the whole history of linguistic development. 
Unduly impressed by the career of modern cultivated dialects, 
their etlacement of existing dialectic differences and pro- 
duction of homogeneous speech throughout wide regions, 
and failing to recognize the nature of the forces which have 
made such a career possible, these authors affirm that the 
natural tendency of language is from diversity to uniformity ; 
that dialects are, in the regular order of things, antecedent 
to language; that human speech began its existence in a 
state of infinite dialectic division, which has been, from the 
first, undergoing coalescence and reduction. It may seem 
hardly worth while to spend any effort in refuting an opinion 


* I refer in particular to M. Ernest Renan, of Paris, whose peculiar views 
upon this subject are laid down in his General History of the Semitic Lan- 
guages, and more fully in his treatise on the Origin of Language (2nd edition, 
Paris, 1858, ch. viii.)—a work of great ingenuity and eloquence, but one 
of which the linguistic philosophy is in a far higher degree construct- 
ive than inductive. Professor Max Miller, also, when treating of the 
Teutonic class of languages (Lectures on Language, first series, fifth lece 
ture), appears distinctly to give in his adhesion to the same view. 

” 


a 


178 {LLUSTRATIONS OF [ LECT, 


of which the falsity will have been made apparent by the 
exposition already given; yet a brief additional discussion of 
the point will afford us the opportunity of setting in a 
clearer light one or two principles whose distinct apprehen- 
sion is necessary in order to the successful prosecution of 
our farther inquiries. | 

It will be readily admitted that the difference between 
any given dialect and another of kindred stock is made up 
of a multitude of separate items of difference, and consists in 
their sum and combined effect: thus, for instance, words are 
possessed by the one which are wanting in the other; words — 
found in both are differently pronounced by each, or are used 
in senses either not quite identical or very unlike ; combina- 
tions and forms belong only to one, or are corrupted and 
worn down in diverse degrees by the two; phrases occur in 
the one which would be meaningless in the other. Now the 
gradual production of such differences as these is something 
which we see to have been going on in language during the 
whole period of its history illustrated by literary records ; 
“nay, which is even going on at the present day under our 
own eyes. If the Italian uses in the sense of ‘truth’ the 
word verita, the Spanish verdad, the French vérité, the 
English verity, we know very well that it is not because all 
these forms were once alike current in the mouths of the 
same people, till those who preferred each one of them sorted 
themselves out and combined together into a separate com- 
munity ; 1t must be because some single people formerly used 
in the same sense a single word, either coincident with one 
of these or nearly resembling them all, from which they have 
all descended, in the ordinary course of linguistic tradition, 
that always implies liability to linguistic change. We happen 
to know, indeed, in this particular case, by direct historical 
evidence, what the original word was, and who were the 
people that used it: it was véritat (nominative veritas), and 
belonged to the language of Rome, the Latin: its present 
varieties of form merely illustrate the usual effects of 
phonetic corruption. So, too, if I say attend! and the French- 
man attendez! our words differ in pronunciation, in gram- 
matical form (the latter haying a plural ending which the 


v.] DIALECTIC DIVERGENCE. 179 


former lacks), and in sense (the French meaning ‘ wait! ) 3 
and, in all these respects save the last, both differ from the 
Latin attendite ; yet of this both are alike the hereditary 
representatives: no Roman ever said either attend or ats 
tendez. But this same reasoning we apply also in other cases, 
where direct historical evidence is wanting, arriving without 
hesitation or uncertainty at like conclusions, If we Say true, 
while the German says trew, the Dane tro, the Netherlander 
trouw, and so on, we do not once think of doubting that it is 
because we have all gotten nearly the same word, in nearly 
the same sense, by uninterrupted tradition from some prini- 
tive community in which a like word had a like sense ; and 
we set ourselves to discover what this word was, and what 
and why have been the changes which have brought it into 
its present varying forms. The discordance between our 
futher, the Anglo-Saxon Seder, the Icelandic JSadir, the Dutch 
vader, and the German vater, does not, any more than that 
between verity and its analogues, compel us to assume a 
time when these words existed as primitive dialectic varieties 
in the same community : we regard them as the later effects 
of the separation of one community into several. And when 
we compare them all with the Latin pater, the Greek pater, 
the Persian peder, the Sanskrit pitar—all which are but 
palpable forms of the same original from which the rest have 
come—our inference is still the same. Or, to recur once 
more to an example which we have already had occasion to 
adduce, our word is is the English correspondent of the 
German ist, the Latin est, the Greek esti, the Lithuanian 
esti, the Slavonian yest’, the Persian est, the Sanskrit asti. 
To the apprehension of the historical student of language, 
all these are nothing more than slightly varying forms of the 
same vocable: their difference is one of the innumerable 
differences of detail which distinguish from one another the 
languages we have named. We cannot, to be sure, go back 
under the sure guidance of contemporary records to the 
people among whom, and the time at which, the word origin- 
ated: but we are just as far in this case as in those referred 
to above from being driven to the conclusion that all its pre- 
sent representatives are equallv primitive, that they cousti- 


180 DIALECTIC DIFTERENCES. [ LECT. 


tute together the state of indefinite dialectic variety in which 
the expression of the third person singular of the verb to be 
began, and that the nations, modern or ancient, in whose 
languages we find them are the lineal descendants of those 
eroups in a former community who finally made up their 
minds to prefer the one or the other of them. On the 
contrary, we derive, with all the confidence belonging to a 
strictly logical process of reasoning, the conclusion that the 
words we are considering are later variations of a single 
original, namely astz, and that they would have no existence 
if a certain inferrible community, at an unknown period in 
the past, had not put together the verbal root as, signifying 
‘existence,’ and the pronoun é#, meaning ‘ that,’ to form that 
original, 

The same reasoning is applicable to every other individual 
instance of dialectic difference. And it is so applied, in each 
individual instance, even by those who maintain the priority 
of dialects : such comparison and inference as we have been 
illustrating constitute the method of linguistic research of the 
comparative philologists, among whom they too desire to 
count themselves. Only they fail to note that the whole sum 
of dialectic difference is made up of instances like these, and 
that, if the latter point back, in detail, to an original unity, 
the former must, in its entirety, do the same. “ As there 
were families, clans, confederacies, and tribes,” we are told,* 
“before there was 4 nation, so there were dialects before 
there was a language.” The fallacy involved in this com- 
parison, as in all the reasoning by which is supported the 
view we are combating, is that it does not go back far 
enough; it begins in the middle of historic development, 
instead of at its commencement. If families, clans, and 
tribes were ultimate elements in the history of humanity, if 
they sprang up independently, each out of the soil on which 
it stands, then the indefinite diversity of human language in 
its early stages—a diversity, however, fundamental, and not 
dialectic—might follow, not only as an analogical, but as a 
direct historical consequence. But, if a population of 
scattered communities implies dispersion from a single point, 

* Max Muller, /.c. 


v.] DECREASE OF DIALECTIC DIVERSITY. - 131 


if we must follow back the fates of our race until they centre 
in a timited number of families or in a single pair, which 
expanded by natural increase, and scattered, forming the 
little communities which later fused together into greater 
ones—and who will deny that it was so ?—then, also, both 
by analogy and by historical necessity, it follows that that is 
the true view of the relation of dialects and language to 
which we have been led above: namely, that growth and 
divarication of dialects acconipany the spread and disconnec- 
tion of communities, and that assimilation of dialects accom- 
panies the coalescence of communities, 

Prevalence of the same tongue over wide regions of the 
earth’s surface was, indeed, impossible in the olden time, and 
human speech is now, upon the whole, tending toward acon- 
dition of less diversity with every century; but this is only 
owing to the vastly increased efficiency at present of those 
external influences which counteract the inherent tendency 
of language to diversity. As, here in America, a single cul- 
tivated nation, of homogeneous speech, is taking the place of 
' a congeries of wild tribes, with their host of discordant 
tongues, so, on a smaller scale, is it everywhere else : civiliz- 
ation and the conditions it makes are gaining upon barbarism 
and its isolating influences. In the fact that Frenchmen, 
Spaniards, and Italians, on entering our community, all learn 
alike to say with us verity, there is nothing which at all goes 
to prove that verity, vérité, verdad, and verita are primitive 
dialectic varieties, tending toward unity; nor, in the extended 
sway of the cultivated tongues of more modern periods, is 
there aught which in the most distant manner favours the 
theory that dialects are antecedent to uniform speech, and 
that the latter everywhere grows out of the former. 

It is true, again, that a certain degree of dialectic variety 
is inseparable from the being of any language, at any stage 
of its history. We have seen that even among ourselves, 
Where uniformity of speech prevails certainly not less than 
elsewhere in the world, no two individuals speak absolutely 
the same tongue, or would propagate absolutely the same, if 
circumstances should make them the founders of independent 
linguistic traditions. However small, then, may have been 


182 ACCUMULATION OF DIALECTIC DIFFERENCES. [LECT. 


the community which laid the basis of any actually existing 
language or family of languages, we must admit the existence 
of some differences between the idioms of its individual 
members, or families. And if we suppose such a community 
to be dispersed into the smallest possible fragments, and 
each fragment to become the progenitor of a separate com- 
munity, it might be said with a kind of truth that the lan- 
guages of these later communities began their history with 
dialectic differences already developed. The more widely 
extended, too, the original community before its dispersion, 
and the more marked the local differences, not inconsistent 
with mutual intelligibility, existing in its speech, the more 
capital, so to speak, would each portion have, on which to 
commence its farther accumulation of dialectic variations. 
But there original dialectic differences would themselves be 
the result of previous growth, and they would be of quite 
insignificant amount, as having been able to consist at the 
outset with unity of speech; they might be undistinguishable 
even by the closest analysis among the peculiarities of idiom 
which should have arisen later; and it would be the grossest 
error to maintain either that these last were original and 
primitive, or that they grew out of and were caused by the 
first slight varieties: we should rather say, with entire truth, 
that the later dialects had grown by gradual divergence out 
of a single homogeneous language. 

In an uncultured community, the value of such minor 
discordances of usage as may exist, and do always exist, 
among those who yet, as being able to communicate freely 
with one another, are to be regarded as speaking the same 
tongue, is at its maximum. The first effect of the cultiva- 
tion of a language, as we style it, is to wipe out this class of 
differences, extending the area and perfecting the degree of 
linguistic uniformity. And its work is accomplished, first 
as last, whether the scale of variation over which its influ- 
ence bears sway be less or greater, by selection, not by 
fusion. The varying usages of different individuals and 
localities are not averaged, but the usages of one part of the 


community are set up as a norm, to which those of the rest 
eholl ha nanfaws nd and foam shinh forthar variation shall be 


v.| CULTIVATION OF LANGUAGE, 183 


checked or altogether prevented. An element of conscious: 
ness, of reflectiveness, is introduced into the use of language ; 
acknowledged imitation of certain models, deference to 
authority in matters of speaking, take the place of the 
former more spontaneous and careless employment of the 
common means of communication, governed only by the 
necessities of communication, which are always felt but not- 
always reasoned upon. The best speakers, those who use 
words with most precision, with most fulness and force 
of meaning, with most grace and art, become the teachers of 
the rest. And however this influence be exerted, whether 
by simple recognition of authority in those who deserve it, 
or with the aid of a popular literature, handed down by 
tradition, or whether it rise to grammatical and lexical culture, 
to the possession of letters and learning, it is of the same 
nature ; it produces its conserving and ennobling effects in 
the same way. It is the counsellor and guide, not the 
master, of national usage. It undertakes no wholesale re- 
formation. It does not shear off from a language masses of 
unnecessary means of expression which untaught speakers 
would fain force upon it; it finds no such materials to deal 
with. Some write and speak as if the uncultivated employer 
of speech were impelled to launch out indefinitely into new 
words and forms, rioting in the profusion of his linguistic 
creations, until grammar comes to set bounds to his prodi- 
gality, and to reduce the common tongue within reasonable 
dimensions. But it is by no means so easy and seductive a 
thing to increase the resources of a language. We do not 
look to our dictionaries and grammars to know if we may 
use elements which come crowding to our lips and demanding 
utterance. Linguistic growth is a slow process, extorted, as 
it were, by necessity, by the exigencies of use, from the 
speakers of language. The obligation resting upon each one 
of making himself intelligible to his fellows, and understand- 
ing them in turn, is the check, and a sufficient one, upon in- 
dividual license of production. Economy is a main element 
in linguistic development; that which is superfluous in 
a dialect, not needed for practical use, falls off and dies of 
itself, without waiting to be lopped away by the pruning: 


184 DIALECTIC CORRESPONDENCES ALWAYS [ LECT. 


knife of a grammarian. Culture chooses, from among the 
varieties of equivalent form, utterance, and phrase which a 
defective communication has allowed to spring up within 
the limits of the same community, those which shall be ac- 
cepted as most worthy of preservation, It maintains what 
is good, warns against abuses, and corrects offences com- 
mitted by a part against the authority of prevailing usage. A 
cultivated language is thus simply one whose natural growth 
has gone on for a certain period under the conscious and 
interested care of its best speakers; which has been placed 
in their charge, for the maintenance of a standard, for the 
repression of disfiguring alterations, for enrichment with ex- 
pressions for higher thought and deeper knowledge ; for the 
enforcement, in short, of their own studied usages of speech 
upon the less instructed and inore heedless masses of a com- 
munity. 

It is obviously futile to attempt to draw anywhere @ 
dividing line in the development of language—to say, these 
differences on the one side are the result of later linguistic 
growth; those, on the other side, are original, a part of the 
primitive variety and indefiniteness of human speech. The 
nature and uses of speech, and the forees which act upon it 
and produce its changes, cannot but have been essentially 
the same during all the periods of its history, amid all its 
changing circumstances, in all its varying phases ; and there 
is no way in which ity unknown past can be investigated, 
except by the careful study of its living present and its 
recorded past, and the extension and application to remote 
conditions of laws and principles deduced by that study. 
Like effects, as we have already had occasion to claim, imply 
like causes, not less in the domain of language than in that of 
physical science; and he who pronounces the origin and 
character of ancient dialects and forms of speech to be funda- 
mentally different from those of modern dialects and forms 
of speech can only be compared with the geologist who 
should acknowledge the formation by aqueous action of recent 
gravel and pebble-beds, but should deny that water had any- 
thing to do with the production of aacient sandstones and 
conglomerates. 


vi IMPLY ORIGINAL UNITY, 185 


The continuity and similarity of the course of linguistic 
history in all its stages, andthe competency of linguistic 
correspondences, wherever we find them, to prove unity of 
origin and community of tradition, are truths which we need 
to bear in mind as we proceed with our inquiries into lan- 
guage. If we meet in different tongues with words which 
are clearly the same word, notwithstanding differences of form 
and meaning which they may exhibit, we cannot help con- 
cluding that they are common representatives of a single 
original, once formed and adopted by a single community, 
and that from this they have come down by the ordinary and 
still subsisting processes of linguistic tradition, which always 
and everywhere involve liability to alteration in outer shape 
and inner content. It is true that there are found in lan- 
guage accidental resemblances between words of wholly dif: 
ferent origin: of such we shall have to take more particular 
notice in a later lecture (the tenth): but exceptions like 
these do not make void the rule; the possibility of their 
occurrence only imposes upon the etymologist the necessity of 
greater care and circumspection in his comparisons, of studying 
more thoroughly the history of the words with which he has 
to deal. It is also true that real historical correspondences 
may exist between isolated words in two languages without 
implying the original identity of those languages, or anything 
more than a borrowing by the one out of the stores of 
expression belonging to the other. Our own tongue, for 
instance, aside from its wholesale composition out of the 
tongues of two different races, draws more or less of its 
material from nearly every one of the languages of Europe, 
and from not a few of those of Asia, Africa, and America, 
Yet it is evident that such borrowing has its limits, both of 
degree and of kind, and that it may be within the power of 
the linguistic student readily to distinguish its results from 
the effects of a genuine community of linguistic tradition, 

The method by which we are to proceed in grouping and 
classifying the languages spoken by mankind, now and in 
former times, results with necessary consequence from the 
principles which we have laid down. We have seen that no 
given form of speech remains permanently the same: each 


186 GROUPING OF LANGUAGES [LECT, 


chanyes continually, in its structure and content, and tends 
to divide, with the progress of time, into varying forms or 
dialects. No existing language, no recorded language, 1s 
original; each is the descendant of some earlier one, from 
which, perhaps, other existing or recorded languages are 
equally descended. With this easy clew to guide us, the 
labyrinth of human speech is a labyrinth no longer; it is 
penetrated by paths which we may securely follow. We 
have simply to group together according to their affinities the 
languages known to us; connecting, first of all, those whose 
totality of structure, along with what history actually teaches 
us of their derivation, shows them so plainly to be forms of 
the same original that even the most exaggerated scepticism 
could not venture to deny their relationship; then goimg on 
to extend our classification from the more clearly to the more 
obscurely, from the more closely to the more remotely con- 
nected, until we have done the utmost which the nature of 
the case permits, until analysis and deduction will carry us 
no farther. The way is plain enough at first, and even the 
most careless may tread it without fear of wandering ; but to 
follow it to the end demands, along with much labour and 
pains, no little wariness and clearness of vision. 

Let us, then, turn aside for a time from pursuing the 
direct course of our fundamental inquiry, “ why we speak so 
and so,” to ask who “we” are to whom the inquiry relates ; 
who, along with us that acknowledge the various forms of 
the English as our native speech, use languages which are, 
after all, only dialectic forms of one great original mother- 
tongue. 

The results of such an investigation into the relationship 
of the English language have been, to a certain extent, taken 
for granted during our whole discussion. This was unavoid- 
able: we could not otherwise have talked at all of genetie 
connection, or illustrated the processes of linguistic growth. 
Now, however, we have to take up the subject more system- 
atically, showing the extent to which the tie of relationship 
reaches, and presenting some of the evidence which proves its 
reality. 

To assert that the slightly differing forms of speech which 


v.] BY GENETIC RELATIONSHIP. 187 


prevail in the various parts of our own country, and even the 
more noteworthy dialects found among the classes of the 
population of Britain, form together only one language, is tc 
assert a truism: no man in his sober senses would presume 
to doubt it. Let any one, however ignorant of history he 
may be, go about the globe, finding on each side of the 
Atlantic, and scattered from island to island, communities 
who speak English, though tinged with local colouring, and 
it will not enter into his mind to doubt that they were 
scattered thither from some common centre, that they all 
have their accordant speech by community of linguistic 
tradition. A like conclusion is reached almost as directly, 
if we follow back to the continent of Europe the traces of 
those adventurous tribes which, as history distinctly informs 
us, colonized at no very remote date the British isles, and 
note what languages are still spoken upon the shores whence 
they set forth on their career of conquest. The larger and 
more indispensable part of English, as has been already 
pointed out, finds its kindred in Germany, whence came the 
Saxon and Anglian portion of our ancestry. ‘The community 
of tradition between the English and the German, Nether- 
Jandish, Swedish, Danish, and so on, is so pervading, and its 
evidences are so patent to view, that no one, probably, who 
nas ever added a knowledge of either of the languages named 
to that of his English mother-tongue has failed to be struck 
by it, and to be convinced that, in their main structure and 
material, the two were one speech. But his experience has 
aiso taught him that the difference between them is far from 
being inconsiderable, and that, unfortunately for him, he is by 
no means able to speak and write German or Swedish, 
because English, like them, is Germanic. If an American, 
he will talk readily with an educated Englishman; he will 
even tnake shift to understand a Yorkshireman, a broad 
Scotchman, or an Irishman fresh from hig native bogs; but 
put him and a German together, and the two are well-nigh 
as deaf and dumb to each other as if the one of them were a 
Greek or a Hindu. Plainly enough, the explanation of 
their difficulty is simply this: these two Germanic dialects, 
originally one language and belonging to a single community, 


188 GERMANIC GROUP. | LECT, 
L 


have been now so long separated, and their independent 
changes in the interval have been so great, that free and 
intelligent communication is no longer possible between 
those who have learned to speak them: one must have some- 
what of instruction in both in order to be able to discover 
the fact of their relationship. 

Not all the Germanic languages, however, are allied with 
the English in equal degree. The Low-German dialects, as 
they are called, those which occupy the northern shores and 
lowlands of the country, stand notably nearer to our tongue 
than do the dialects of central and southern Germany, the 
literary High-German and its next of kin. This relation is 
readily and sufficiently accounted for by the circumstances 
of the Germanic emigration to Britain: our ancestors came 
from the shore provinces, and brought with them the forms 
of speech there prevailing. And there is yet another 
principal group of Germanic languages, codrdinate with the 
two already mentioned : it occupies the outliers of Germany 
to the north, namely Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and 
their remote colony of Iceland. It is usually called the 
Scandinavian group. We have in our own present speech 
not a few traces of its peculiar words and usages, imported 
into England by those fierce Northmen—or Danes, as 
English history is accustomed to style them—whose incur- 
sions during many centuries so harassed the Saxon mon- 
archy. | 

These three groups or classes of existing dialects, the 
Low-German, the High-German, and the Scandinavian, with 
their numerous subdivisions, constitute, then, a well-marked 
family of related languages ; although those who speak them 
can only to a very limited extent understand one another, 
the same sentence or paragraph could not be written in any 
two of them without bringing to light such and so many 
resemblances as even to a superficial examination would 
appear sure proof of a genetic connection. It is past ques- 
tion that all the Germanic dialects are descendants and joint 
representatives of a single tongue, spoken somewhere, at 
some time in the past, by a single community, and that all 
the differences now exhibited by them are owing to the 


a 


v.] ROMANIC GROUP. 189 


separation of this community, in the progress of time, inte 
detached and somewhat isolated portions, with the consequent 
breaking up into diverging lines and currents of the common 
stream of their linguistic tradition. It is even clear that, so 
far as concerns the surviving dialects, the divergence was 
primarily into three main branches, now represented by the 
three groups of languages which have been defined above. 

How it happens that our vocabulary also contains so large 
a store of words that are foreign to all the other Germanic 
dialects, but are shared with us by the nations of southern 
Europe, was fully set forth in the last lecture. We saw that 
the Normans—who, though a people of Germanic blood, had 
lived long enough in France to substitute the idiom of that 
country for their own forgotten tongue—imported into 
England a new current of linguistic tradition, which, after a 
time, mingled peacefully in the same bed with the former 
one. The languages with which ours is thus brought into a 
kind of relationship by marriage were seen to be the French, 
the Spanish and Portuguese, the Italian, the Rheto-Romanice, 
and the Wallachian, each including a host of minor dialects. 
The descent of these tongues, constituting together the 
Romanie group or family, from a common mother, the Latin, 
is written down in full upoy the pages of history, and has 
been by us already briefly reviewed. 

That these two important families of human language, the 
Germanic and the Romanic, are also in remoter degree 
related to one another and to other ancient and modern 
families, as joint branches of a yet more extensive family, is 
a truth equally undeniabie, although not equally obvious. 
That it might be so is evident enough, according to the 
principles which we have already established respecting the 
life of language. There is no limit assignable to the extent 
to which the descendants of a common linguistic stock may 
diverge and become separated from one another. The ques- 
tion is one of fact, of evidence. Only a careful and thorough 
sifting of their linguistic material can determine how far the 
ramifications of genetical relationship may bind together 
languages apparently diverse. If two kindred tongues can, 
by divergent growth, come to differ frov each other as much 


190 OTHER GROUPS OF LANGUAGES [ LECT. 


as English and German, there is no @ priori ground for be- 
lieving that they may not come to differ as much as English 
and Polish, or Greek, or Hindustani. And, by approved 
scientific methods of linguistic research, students of language 
have traced out the boundaries of a grand family of human 
speech, embracing, along with the Germanic and Romanie 
groups, nearly all the other tongues of Europe, and those of 
no small portion of south-western Asia. We will accordingly 
go on first to pass in review the various branches claimed to 
constitute this family, and then to examine the evidence 
upon which the claim is founded. 

Of nearest kindred with the Latin, as well as most nearly 
associated with it in history, is the ancient Greek, its classic 
compeer, but its superior in flexibility and beauty ; superior, 
too, as regards the genius and culture of those to whom it 
served as the instrument of thought; but of far less con- 
spicuous career, and making at the present day but an in- 
significant figure in the sum of human speech, being spoken 
only by the scanty population of Greece itself, and by the 
peoples, partly of Greek origin, which fill the islands and 
line the shores of the A’gean and Black seas. 

The languages displaced by the Latin were, as we have 
seen, in great part Celtic. At the beginning of the historie 
period, the domain of the Celts included no mean portion of 
the soil of Europe. Britain, Gaul, a part of Spain, and the 
north of Italy, together with some of the provinces of 
central Europe, were in their possession. But the more 
energetic and persistent Italic and Germanic races soon 
began to gain ground upon them: and now, for a long suc- 
cession of centuries, no Celtic tribe of any importance has 
maintained its integrity and independence. The Erse, or 
Gaelic of the Scotch Highlands, the native Irish, or Gaelic 
of Ireland, and the insignificant dialect of the Isle of Man, 
representing together the Gadhelic division of Celtic.speech— 
and the Welsh in Wales, and the Breton or Armorican in 
Brittany, representatives of the other, the Cymrie division, 
are the scanty remains of that great family of related tongues 
which, but little more than two thousand years ago, occupied 


al AKIN WITH ENGLISH. 191 


more territory than German, Latin, and Greek combined ; 
and they are all, probably, on their way to extinction. 

The eastern part of Europe is mainly filled by the numer- 
ous branches of another important family, the Slavie or Sla- 
vonic. Although somewhat encroached upon on the west by 
the Germanic, it has, upon the whole, from inconspicuous 
beginnings, grown steadily in consequence since its first 
appearance on the stage of history, and now occupies a com- 
manding position eastward, as the vehicle of civilization to 
northern and central Asia. It covers most of Russia in 
Europe, with Poland, the eastern provinces of Austria, and 
the northern of Turkey. Among its principal branches are 
the Russian, with numerous subdivisions, the Polish, the 
Bohemian, the Servian, and the Bulgarian. All these are 
as distinctly and closely akin with one another as are the 
modern Germanic dialects. 

A more remotely allied branch of the same family, con- 
stituting almost a family by itself, occupies a narrow territory 
about the great bend of the Baltic sea, from the gulf of 
Finland to beyond the German frontier, and comprises the 
Lithuanian, the Livonian or Lettish, and the Old Prussian. 
The latter is already extinct, and the others also appear to 
be going gradually out of existence, under pressure of the 
assimilating influence exerted upon them by the languages of 
the surrounding more powerful communities. 

We have thus reviewed all the languages of modern 
Europe, excepting, first, the Albanian, which is the living 
representative of the ancient Illyrian, and of which the con. 
nections are doubtful (although it is likely to be yet proved 
to belong with the rest, as a branch of the same stock) ; 
secondly, the Basque, in the Pyrenees, a wholly isolated and 
problematical tongue ; thirdly, the Hungarian, with its rela- 
tives, the Finnish and Lappish of the extreme north, and 
other languages spoken by scattered tribes in northern and 
eastern Russia; and finally, the Turkish and its congeners, 
which do but overlap slightly the south-eastern frontier. 
These two last groups, as we shall see hereafter (in the 
eighth lecture), are of a kindred that occupies no small part 


192 CONSTITUTION OF THE [ LECT. 


of northern and central Asia. But before we have gathered 
in all the members of the great family we are seeking to 
establish, we must cross the border of Europe, and enter 
southern Asia. 

Asia Minor is chiefly in the hands of Turkish tribes, who 
have crowded themselves in there in comparatively modern 
times, driving out, or subjecting and assimilating, the previous 
occupants. The same races stretch eastward, across the 
southern extremity of the Caspian sea, intervening between 
Europe and the countries whose speech shows afhnity with 
that of Hurope. But within, in the hilly provinces of Media 
and Persia, and on the great Iranian table-land, which 
stretches thence to the Indus, we find again abundant traces 
of a linguistic tradition coinciding ultimately with our own. 
The Persian, with all its dialects, ancient and modern, and 
with its outliers on the north-west and on the east—as 
the Armenian, the Kurdish, the Ossetic, and the Afghan— 
constitutes a branch of our family, the Persian or Iranian 
branch. And yet one step farther we are able to pursue the 
same tie of connection. The Iranian languages conduct us 
to the very borders of India: beyond those borders, in Hin- 
dustan, between the bounding walls of the Himalayas and 
Vindhyas, and eastward to the mouths of the Ganges, lies the 

easternmost branch of that grand division of human speech 
to which our own beiongs, the Indian branch, comprising the 
ancient Sanskrit, with its derived and kindred languages. 

The seven groups of languages at which we have thus 
glanced—namely, the Indian, the Persian, the Greek, the 
Latin, the Slavonic (including the Lithuanic), the Germanic, 
and the Celtic—each made up of numerous dialects and 
sub-dialecis, are the members composing one vast and highly- 
important family of human speech, to which, from the names 
of its two extreme members, we give the title of “ Indo- 
European.” It is known also by various other designations : 
some style it “Japhetic,” as if it appertained to the descendants 
of the patriarch Japhet, as the so-called “ Semitic” tongues to 
the descendants of Shem ; “ Aryan” is a yet more popular and 
customary name for it, Nat is liable to objection, as being more 
especially appropriate to the joint Indo-Persian branch of 


v.4 INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY. 193 


the family, since it is used by them, and them alone, in de- 
signating themselves ; and a few still employ the term “ Indv- 
Germanic,” which seems to savour of national prepossession, 
since no good reason can be given why, among the western 
branches, the Germanic should be singled out for representa- 
tion in the general title of the family. 

The languages of this whole family sustain to one another 
a relation which is the same in kind with that subsisting 
between the various Germanic dialects, and differs from it 
only in degree. That the signs of their relationship escape 
the notice of a superficial observer—that the school-boy, or 
even the college-student, when toiling over his Greek and 
Latin tasks, does not suspect, and might be hard to per- 
suade, that the classical languages and his mother-tongue 
are but modified forms of the same original, is evidently no 
ground for discrediting the fact. The uninstructed English 
speaker, as we have seen, finds even the nearly kindred 
German as strange and unintelligible as the Turkish: both 
are to him in equal degree, as he says, “all Dutch,” or “all 
Greek ;” and yet, a little learning enables him to find half 
his native vocabulary, in a somewhat changed but still plainly 
recognizable form, in the German dictionary. A higher de- 
gree of instruction is required, in order to the discovery and 
appreciation of that evidence which proves the remoter rela- 
tionship of the Indo-European tongues ; a wider comparison, a 
more skilled and penetrating analysis, must be applied; but, 
by its application, the conclusion is reached just as dircetly 
and surely in the one case as in the other. The inquirer 
fully convinces himself that the correspondences in their 
material and structure are too numerous, and of too intimate 
a character, to be explained with any plausibility by the 
supposition of accidental coincidence, or of mutual borrowing 
or imitation; that they can only be the consequence of a 
common linguistic tradition. 

Any complete or detailed exhibition of the evidence which 
shows the original unity of the languages claimed to consti- 
tute the Indo-European family is, of course, utterly im- 
possible within the necessary limits of these lectures; but it 


is altogether desirable that we should direct our attention te 
13 


194 CLASSES OF CORRESPONDING WORDS [ LECT. 


at least a few samples of the correspondences from which se 
important a truth isderived. It will be allowable to do this 
the more succinctly, inasmuch as the truth is one now so 
well established and so generally received, and of which the 
proof is already familiar to so many. We may fairly claim, 
indeed, that it is denied only by those who are ignorant of 
the facts and methods of linguistic reasoning, or whose judg- 
ments are blinded by preconceived opinion. 

I shall not strive after originality in my selection of 
the correspondences which illustrate the common origin 
of the Indo-European tongues, but shall follow the course 
already many times trodden by others. This is one which 
is marked out by the circumstances of the case. It would 
be extremely easy, choosing out any two from among the 
languages which we wish to compare—as the Latin and 
Greek, the Greek and Sanskrit, the Latin and Russian, 
the Lithuanian and German — to draw up long lists of 
words common to both, out of every part of their respective 
vocabularies; especially, if we were to take the time and 
pains to enter into a discussion of the laws governing their 
phonetic variations, and so to point out their obscure as 
well as their more obvious correspondences: and we might 
thus satisfactorily prove them all related, by proving each 
one related with each of the rest in succession. When, 
however, we seek for, words which are clearly and palpably 
identical in all or nearly all the branches of the family, we 
have to resort to certain special classes, as the numerals and 
the pronouns. The reason of this it is not difficult to point 
out. For a large portion of the objects, acts, and states, of 
the names for which our languages are composed, it is com- 
paratively easy to find new designations: they offer numer- 
ous salient points for the names-giving faculty to seize upon ; 
the characteristic qualities, the analogies with other things, 
which suggest and call forth synonymous or nearly synonym- 
ous titles, are many. Hence a language may originate a 
variety of appellations for the same thing—as, for horse, we 
have also the almost equivalent names steed, nag, courser, 
racer ; and further, for the different kinds and conditions of 
the same animal, the names séallion, mare, gelding, filly, calt, 


v. | IN THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES. 195 


pony, and others—and, in the breaking up of the language 
into dialects, one of these synonymous appellations is liable 
to become the prevailing one in one dialect, another in 
another, to the neglect and loss of all but the one selected. 
Or, anew name is started in a single dialect, wins currency 
there, and crowds out of use its predecessors. The German, 
for instance, has, indeed, our word horse, in the form ross 
(earlier hros), but employs it more rarely, preferring to use 
instead pferd, a word of which we know nothing. The 
modern Romanic tongues, too, say in the same sense caballo, 
cheval, etc., words coming from the Latin caballus, ‘nag,’ 
and they have lost almost altogether the more usual and 
dignified Latin term eguus. Thus, further, the modern 
French name for ‘ shoemaker’ is cordonnier, literally ‘ worker 
in Cordovan leather;’ for ‘cheese,’ JSromage, properly 
‘pressed into a form, moulded;’ for ‘liver,’ Jove, originally 
‘cooked with figs ’—that fruit having been, as it seems, at a 
certain period, the favourite garnish for dishes of liver: 
while the Latin appellations of these. three objects have gone 
out of use and out of memory. But for the numerals and 
pronouns our languages have never shown any disposition to 
create a synonymy ; it was, as we may truly say, no easy task 
for the linguistic faculty to arrive at a suitable sign for the 
ideas they convey; and, when the sign was once found, it 
maintained itself thenceforth in use everywhere, without 
danger of replacement by any other, of later coinage. Hence 
all the Indo-European nations, however widely they may be 
separated, and however discordant in manners and civiliza- 
tion, count with the same words, and use the same personal 
pronouns in individual address—the same, with the excep- 
tion, of course, of the changes which phonetic corruption has 
wrought upon their forms. 

For reasons not so easily explainable, the Indo-European 
languages show a hardly less noteworthy general accordance 
in regard to the terms by which, within the historical period, 
or down even to the present time, they indicate the degrees 
of near relationship, such as futher, mother, daughter, brother, 
sister. Formed, as these words were, in the earliest period 


of history of the common mother-tongue, they have in nearly 
ia 


196 CORRESPONDENCES IN THE [ LECT. 


all its branches escaped being superseded by expressions of 
later growth, although there is hardly one of them which 
does not here and there exhibit a modern substitute. 

The following table will set forth, it is believed, in a plain 
and apprehensible manner some of the correspondences of 
which we have been speaking. For the sake of placing 
their value in a clearer light, I add under each word its 
equivalents in three of the languages—namely Arabic, 
Turkish, and Hungarian—which, though neighbours of the 
Indo-European tongues, or enveloped by them, are of wholly 
different kindred. 


English two three seven thou me mother | brother |daughter 
Germanic: 

Dutch twee drie even my moeder |\broeder |dochter 
Icelandic tvwd thriu sid thu mik modhir \brodhir |dottir 
High-German | zwet adret Sieben du mich mutter |\bruder |tochter 
Mceso-Gothie | twa thri sibun thu mik brothar |dauhtar 
Lithuanic du tri septynt |\tu manen | moter brolis dukter 
Slavonic dwa tri sedmi ti man mater brat dochy 
Celtic dau trt secht iw me mathair |brathair | dear (7) 
Latin duo tres septem |tu me mater | frater 

Greek diio trets hepta sti me meter phrater |thugater 
Persian | diva thri hapta tum me matar 

Sanskrit dwa tri sapta twam me matar |\bhratar |duhitar 
Arabic ithn thalath |sav anta ana umm akh bint 
Turkish ikt lich yedt sen ben and kardash | kiz 
Hungarian ket harom | het te engem anya JSiwer leany 


I have selected, of course, for inclusion in this table, 
those words of the several classes represented which exhibit 
most clearly their actual unity of descent: in others, it would 
require some detailed discussion of phonetic relations to 
make the same unity appear. Thus, the Sanskrit panca, the 
Greek pente, the Latin guwingue, and the Gothic Jim, all 
meaning ‘five, are as demonstrably the later metamorphoses 
of a single original word as are the varying fornis of the 
primitive fri, ‘three, given above: each of their phonetic 
changes being supported by numerous analogies in the 
respective languages. The whole scheme of numeral and 
pronominal forms and of terms of relationship is substantially 
one and the same in all the tongues ranked as Indo-Eu- 
ropean. 

These facts, of themselves, would go far toward proving 
the original unity of the languages in qzestion, To look 


v.] INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES. 197 


upon correspondences like those here given as the result of 
accident is wholly preposterous: no sane man would think 
of ascribing them to such a cause. Nor is the hypothesis of 
a natural and inherent bond between the sound and the 
aense, which would prompt language-makers in different 
parts of the earth to assign, independently of one another, 
these names to these conceptions, at all more admissible. 
The existence of a natural bond could be claimed with even 
the slightest semblance of plausibility only in the case of the 
pronouns and the words for ‘father’ and ‘mother;’ and 
there, too, the claim could be readily disposed of—if, indeed, 
it be not already sufficiently refuted by the words from stranger 
tongues which are cited in the table. Mutual borrowing, too,. 
transfer from one tongue to another, would be equally far 
from furnishing an acceptable explanation. Were we dealing 
with two or three neighbouring dialects alone, the suggestion 
of such a borrowing would not be so palpably futile as 
in the case in hand, where the facts to be explained are 
found in so many tongues, covering a territory which stretches 
from the mouths of the Ganges to the shores of the Atlantic. 
A modified form of the hypothesis of mutual borrowing is put 
forth by some who are indisposed to admit the essential one- 
ness of Indo-European speech. Some tribe or race, they 
say, of higher endowments and culture, has leavened with its 
material and usages the tongues of all these scattered peoples, 
engrafting upon their original diversity an element of agree- 
ment and unity. But this theory is just as untenable as the 
others which we have been reviewing. Instances of mixture 
of languages—resulting either from the transmission of a 
higher and more favoured culture, or from a somewhat equal 
and intimate mingling of races, or from both together—have 
happened during the historical period in sufficient numbers 
to allow the linguistic student to see plainly what are its 
effects upon language, and that they are very different 
from those which make the identity of Indo-European lan- 
guage. The introduction of culture and knowledge, of art ana 
science, may bring in a vocabulary of expressions for the know- 
ledge communicated, the conceptions taught or prompted; but 
it cannot touch the most timate fund of speech, the words 


198 CORRESPONDENCES IN THE [ LECT. 


significant of those ideas without whose designation no 
spoken tongue would be worthy of the name. If we could 
possibly suppose that the rude ancestors of the Indo-Eu- 
ropean nations, more brutish than the Africans and Polyne- 
sians of the present day, were unable to count their fingers even 
until taught by some missionary tribe which went from one 
to the other, scattering these first rudiments of mathematical 
knowledge, we might attribute to its influence the close 
correspondence of the Indo-European numeral systems; but 
then we should have farther to assume that the same teachers 
instructed them how to address one another with J and thou, 
and how to name the members of their own families: and 
- who will think of maintaining such an absurdity ? All the 
preponderating influence of the Sanskrit-speaking tribes of 
northern India over the ruder population of the Dekhan, to 
which they gave religion, philosophy, and polity, has only 
resulted in filling the tongues of the south with learned 
Sanskrit, much as our own English is filled with learned 
Latin and Greek. Even that coalescence of nearly equal 
populations, languages, and cultures out of which has grown 
the tongue we speak, has, as was pointed out in the fourth 
of these lectures, left the language of common life among 
us—the nucleus of a vocabulary which the child first learns, 
and every English speaker uses every day, almost every 
hour—still overwhelmingly Saxon: the English is Germanic 
in its fundamental structure, though built higher and de- 
corated in every part with Romanic material. So is it algo 
with the Persian, in its relation to the Arabic, of whose 
material its more learned and artificial styles are in great 
part made up; so with the Turkish, of which the same thing 
is true with regard to the Persian and Arabic, But most of 
all do these cases of the mingling of different tongues in one 
language, and every other known case of a like character, 
show that the grammatical system, the apparatus of inflection 
and word-making, the means by which vocables, such as they 
stand in their order in the dictionary, are taken out and 
woven together into connected discourse, resists longest and 
most obstinately any trace of intermixture, the intrusion of 
forcign elements and foreign habits. However many French 


v.] INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES. 199 


nouns and verbs were admitted to full citizenship in English 
speech, they all had to give up in this respect their former 
nationality: every one of them was declined or conjugated 
after Germanic models. Such a thing as a language with a 
mixed grammatical apparatus has never come under the 
cognizance of linguistic students: it would be to them a 
monstrosity ; it seems an impossibility. Now the Indo- 
European languages are full of the plainest and most un- 
equivocal correspondences of grammatical structure ; they 
show abundant traces of a common system of word-formation, 
of declension, of conjugation, however disguised by the cor- 
ruptions and overlaid by the new developments of a later time: 
and these traces are, above all others, the most irrefutable 
evidences of the substantial unity of their linguistic tradition. 
We will notice but a single specimen of this kind of evidences, 
the most striking one, perhaps, which Indo-European gram- 
mar has to exhibit. This is the ordinary declension of the 
verb, in its three persons singular and plural. In drawing 
out the comparison, we cannot start, as before, from the 
English, because, as has been shown in a previous lecture 
(the third), the English has lost its ancient apparatus of 
personal endings: we must represent the whole Germanic 
branch by its oldest member, the Meso-Gothic. The table 
is as follows: * 


English ‘Ihave’ |‘thou hast’! ‘he has’ | ‘we haye’| ‘ ye have’ |‘ they have 
Mceso-Gothic haba habai-s habai-th | haba-m habai-th | haba-n 
Mod. Persian -m -d -m -d nd 
Celtic ~m -d mM -d -t 
Lithuanic -mi -st -ti -me -te -ti 
Slavonic -mi -st -tt -mu -te nti 
Latin habeo | habe-s habe-t habe-mus habe-tis | habe-nt 
Greek -mi -si -tt -mes -te nti 
Sanskrit -mi -st -ti mast -tha nti 


Fundamental and far-reaching as are the correspondences, 


* Owing to the difficulty of finding a single verb which shall present the 
endings in all the different languages, the verb ¢o have has been selected, and 
“AME in full in the two languages in which it occurs, the terminations alone 

eing elsewhere written. These are not in all cases the most usual endings 
of conjugation, but such as are found in ve, 4s, or in dialects, which have 
preserved more faithfully their primitive forms. 


200 THE INDO-EUROPEAN MOTHER-TRIBE. [ LECT. 


of material and of form, which have thus been brought fore 
ward, it 1s not necessary that we insist upon their competency, 
alone and unaided, to prove the Indo-European languages 
only later dialectic forms of a single original tongue. Their 
convincing force lies in the fact that they are selected in- 
stances, examples chosen from among a host of others, which 
abound in every part of the grammar and vocabulary of all 
the languages in question, now so plain as to strike the eye 
of even the hasty student, now so hidden under later peculiar 
growth as to be only with difficulty traceable by the acute 
and practised linguistic analyst. He who would know them 
better may find them in such works as the Comparative 
Grammars of Bopp and Schleicher and the Greek Etymolo- 
gies of Curtius. An impartial examination of them must 
persuade even the most sceptical that these tongues exhibit 
resemblances which can be accounted for only on the suppo- 
sition of a prevailing identity of linguistic tradition, such as 
belongs to the common descendants of one and the same 
mother-tongue. On the other hand, all their differences, 
great and widely sundering as these confessedly are, can be 
fully explained by the prolonged operation of the same causes 
which have broken up the Latin into the modern Romanic 
dialects, or the original Germanic tongue into its various 
existing forms, and which have converted the Anglo-Saxon of 
a thousand years ago into our present English. Besides its 
natural divergent growth, the original Indo-European tongue 
has doubtless been in some degree diversified by intermixture 
here and there with languages of other descent; but there is 
no reason for believing that this has been an element of any 
considerable importance in its history of development. At 
some period, then, in the past, and in some limited region of 
Europe or Asia, lived a tribe from whose imperfect dialect 
have descended all those rich and cultivated tongues now 
spoken and written by the teeming millions of Europe and 
of some of the fairest parts of Asia. 

To know when and where this tribe lived and formed its 
language is unfortunately beyond our power. It is, indeed, 
often assumed and asserted that the original Indo-European 
home was in the north-eastern part of the Iranian plateau, 


v. | ITS ORIGINAL HOME UNKNOWN. 201 


near the Hindu-Koh mountains; but go definite a determina. 
tion possesses not the slightest shadow of authority or value. 
We really know next to nothing of the last movements which 
have brought any branch of the family into its present place 
of abode ; even these lie beyond the reach of the very 
hoariest traditions which have come down to us, The day- 
light of recorded history dawns first upon the easternmost, 
the Indo-Persian or Aryan, branch. ‘The time is probably 
not far from two thousand years before Christ. We there 
sce the Sanskrit-speaking tribes but just across the thresh- 
old of India, working their way over the river-valleys and 
intervening sand-plains of its north-western province, the 
Penjab, toward the great fertile territory, watered by the 
Ganges and its tributaries, of which they are soon to be 
come the masters; and we know that India, at least, is not 
the first home, but one of the latest conquests, of the family. 
The epoch, however, early as it appears to us, is far from the 
beginning of Indo-European migrations ; the general separa- 
tion of the branches had taken place long before: and who 
shall say which of them has wandered widest, in the search 
after a permanent dwelling-place ? The joint home of In- 
dians and Persians was doubtless in north-eastern Ivan, 
the scene of the oldest Persian’ religious and heroic legend 
and tradition ; but there is no evidence whatever to prove 
that they were the aborigines of that region, and that all 
migration had been westward from thence.* Greek history 
and tradition also penetrate a little way into the second 
thousand years before Christ; but the Greeks are then al- 
ready in quiet possession of that little peninsula, with the 
neighbouring islands and Asiatic shores, whence the glory of 
their genius afterward irradiated the world; and, for aught 
that they are able to tell us of their origin, they might have 
sprung out of the ground there—born, according to their 
own story, of the stones which Deucalion and Pyrrha threw 


* Some authorities incline to regard the geographical reminiscences of the 
Zend-avesta (in the first chapter of the Vendidad) as indicating the course of 
the joint Aryan migration from the original family home; but the claim 
appears to me so wholly baseless, and even preposterous, that I find it diffis 
cult to understand how any man should seriously put it forward, 


202 THE INDO-EUROPEAN HOME [ LECT, 


behind them. The Latin race first appears as an insignificant 
handful in central Italy, crowded by other communities, in 
part of kindred blood; but no legend told us respecting its 
entrance into the Italian peninsula i is of the very smalles 
historical vaiue. Roman historians first bring to our know- 
ledge the Celts and Germans. The former are already be- 
ginning to shrink and waste away within their ancient limits 
before the aggressions of the surrounding races: Celtic tales 
of the migrations westward which broug ght them into their 
European seats are but lying legends, mere echoes of their 
later knowledge of the countries and nations to the east- 
ward. Germany is, from the first, the home of the Germans: 
they are a seething mass; south-eastward as well as south- 
westward rove their restless hordes. disturbing for centuries 
the peace of the civilized world; they leave their traces in 
every country of middle Europe, from the Volga to the 
Pillars of Hercules; but whence and when they came 
into Germany, we ask in vain. Last to appear upon the 
historic stage are the Slavonians, in nearly their present 
abodes: a less enterprising, but a stubborn and _ persistent 
race, whose lately sequined civilization has only within a 
short time begun to be aggressive. Of its own origin, it has 
nothing at all to say. 

But if history and tradition thus refuse to aid us in search- 
ing for the Indo-European home, neither do the indications 
of language point us with anything like definiteness or cer- 
tainty to its locality. The tongues of the easternmost 
branches, the Persian and Indian, do, indeed, exhibit the least 
departure from that form of speech which a general com- 
parison of all the dialects shows to have been the primitive 
one ; but this is very far from proving the peoples who speak 
them to have remained nearest to their primitive seats. 
Migration does not necessarily lead to rapidity of linguistic 
changes, nor does permanence of location always imply per- 
sistency of linguistic type. Thus—to refer only to two or 
three striking facts among the languages of this family—the 
Greek has preserved much more than the Armenian of that 
material and structure which were of earliest Indo-European 
development, notwithstanding the more oriental position of 


v.4 UNKNOWN AND UNDISCOVERABLE. 2033 


the latter; of all the existing tongues of the whule great 
family, the Lithuanian, on the Baltic, retains by far the most 
antique aspect; and, among the Germanic dialects, the 
speech of Iceland, the latest Germanic colony, is least varied 
from their common type. All that primitiveness of form, in 
respect both to language and institutions, which characterizes 
the Aryan branch of the family—and especially the Indian 
member of the branch, in its oldest period, represented to us 
in the Vedas—would be fully and satisfactorily accounted 
for, without denying them a long history and wide migration, 
by attributing to them an exceptionally conservative disposi- 
tion—such a disposition as so markedly distinguishes the 
Indian above the Persian people since their separation, making 
the former, in a vastly higher degree than the latter, the 
model and illustration of earliest Indo-European antiquity. 
Nor, again, are the inter-connections of the different 
branches, so far as yet made out, of a nature to cast much 
light upon the history of their wanderings, That the separa- 
tion of Indian and Persian is latest of all is, it is true, 
universally admitted. Nearly all agree, moreover, in allowing 
a like special relationship of the Greek and Latin, although 
its comparative remoteness, and the loss of intermediate 
forms, make the question one of decidedly greater doubt and 
difficulty. Beyond this, nothing is at present firmly estab- 
lished. The honour ofa later and closer alliance with the 
Aryan or Indo-Persian branch has been confidently claimed 
for the classical or Greco-Latin, for the Slavonic, and for the 
Germanic, respectively. Within no long time past, a Ger- 
man scholar of high rank* has attempted to lay outa scheme 
of relationship for all the branches of the family. He assumes 
that the original stock parted first into a northern and a 
southern grand division: the northern included what after- 
ward became the Germanic and the Slavo-Lithuanic branches, 
the latter of them dividing yet later into Slavonic and 
Lithuanic ; the southern was broken up first into an Aryan 
and a southern European group, which respectively under- 


* Professor August Schleicher, of Jena: his views may be found drawn 
out in full in the preface to his interesting work on the German language 
(Die Deutsche Sprache, Stuttgart, 1860). 


20k THE PLACE AND TIME OF [ LECT. 


went farther separation, the one into Persian and Indian, the 
other into Greek and Italo-Celtic: while the Italic, of which 
the Latin is the chief, and the Celtic, were the last to begin 
their independent history, being still more closely related 
than the Latin and the Greek. The feature of this arrange- 
ment which is most calculated to repel rather than attract 
assent is the position assigned to the Celtic languages. 
Few scholars are ready to allow that these tongues, in which 
the original and distinctive features of Indo-European speech 
are most of all hidden under the manifold effects of decay 
and new growth, whose Indo-European character was there- 
fore the last of all to be recognized, and whose separation 
from the common stock has been generally looked upon as 
the commencement of its dispersions, are to be regarded as 
the nearest kindred of the Latin—although no one who re- 
members how greatly the rates of linguistic change vary 
among different peoples and under different circumstances 
will venture to pronounce the connection impossible. The 
time has not yet come for a full settlement of these contro- 
yerted points; the means of their solution are, however, 
doubtless contained in the linguistic facts which lie within our 
reach, and a more thorough study and closer comparison will 
one day bring them to light, and may perhaps at the same time 
illustrate the course and order of those grand movements which 
have brought the various races of the family into their present 
seats. But that such or any other evidences will ever direct 
our gaze to the precise region whence the movements had 
their first start is in the very highest degree unlikely: and 
in the mean time it is better candidly to confess our igno- 
rance than to try to hold with confidence an opinion resting 
upon grounds altogether insufficient and untenable. Atany 
rate, we ought fully to acknowledge that linguistic science, 
as such, does not presume to decide whether the Indo- 
European home was in Europe or in Asia: the utmost that 
she does is to set up certain faint and general probabilities, 
which, combined with the natural conditions of soil and 
climate, the traditions of other races, and the direction of 
the grand movements of population in later times, pot te 


v. | INDO-EUROPEAN UNITY UNKNOWN. 205 


the East rather than the West as the starting-point of 
migration. 

If the question of place must thus be left unsettled, that 
of time is not less uncertain. The geologist makes hitherto 
but lame and blundering work of establishing an absolute 
chronology for even the latest alterations of the earth-crust ; 
and the student of language is compelled to found hisestimates 
upon data not less scanty and questionable. The strata of 
human speech laid down in past ages have suffered most 
sweeping and irrestorable denudation, and their rate of 
growth during our present period is too greatly varying to 
furnish us any safe standard of general application. But to 
set a date lower than three thousand years before Christ for 
the dispersion of the Indo-European family would doubtless 
be altogether inadmissible; and the event is most likely to 
have taken place far earlier. Late discoveries are showing 
us that the antiquity of the human race upon the earth must 
be much greater than has been generally supposed. Vistas 
of wonderful interest are opened here, down which we can 
only catch glimpses; but the comparative brevity of the 
period covered by human records must make us modest 
about claiming that we shall ever understand much about 
ultimate beginnings, the first origin of races. 

As regards, however, the grade of civilization and mode of 
life of the Indo-European mother-tribe before its separation 
into branches, the study of language is in condition to give 
us more definite and trustworthy information. It is evident- 
ly within our power to restore, to a certain extent, the 
original vocabulary of the tribe, out of the later vocabularies 
of the different branches. These are composed of words of 
every age, from the most recent to the most primitive. As 
the principal features of grammatical structure were struck 
out before the dispersion, and are yet traceable by the com- 
parative philologist amid the host of newer formations which 
surround them, so was it also with the developed material of 
speech, with the names for such objects, and acts, and pro- 
cesses, and products, as the community had already found 
occasion, and acquired power, to express: they constituted 


206 GRADE OF CULTURE OF [ LECT, 


the linguistic patrimony with which each branch commenced 
its separate history, and may still be seen among the stores 
of more recent acquisition. Any word which is found in the 
possession of all or nearly all the branches is, unless there be 
special reasons to the contrary, to be plausibly regarded as 
having formed part of their common inheritance from the 
time of their unity. A vocabulary constructed of words 
thus hunted out can be, indeed, but an imperfect one, since 
no one can tell what proportion of the primitive tongue may 
have become altogether lost, or changed by phonetic corrup- 
tion nast possibility of recognition, in the later dialects of so 
many branches that its true character is no longer discover- 
able: but, if the list be drawn up with due skill and care, 
it may be depended upon as far as it goes. And as, from the 
stock of words composing any existing or recorded language, 
we can directly draw important conclusions respecting the 
knowledge, circumstances, and manners of the people who 
speak it, so we can do the same thing with the fragment of 
Indo-European speech which we shall have thus set up. It 
is obvious, too, that the results of such an investigation 
must be more satisfactory, the more primitive and unlettered 
the people respecting which it is made, the more exclusively 

native in origin and restricted in scope their civilization. A 
language like our own is an immense encyclopedia, as it 
were, in which are laid away the cognitions and experiences 
of a whole world, and of numerous generations ; it is as many- 
sided, as cosmopolitan, as hard to grasp and interpret in 
aestoal as is our culture; while the tongue of a rude and 
‘ablated tribe—like the Fuegians, the Fijians, the Eskimos 
—would be a comparatively plain and legible portraiture of 
its coudition and character. 

Some of the main results of the investigation made b 

means of language into the primitive state of that tribe which 
spoke the mother- tongue of the Indo-European family have 
been long since déuvin out, and are already become the 
sor monplaces of ethnological science. The subject is far 
from being yet exhausted, and we may look forward to much 
greater confidence of conclusion and definiteness of detail, 
when all the languages of the family shall have been more 


vat THE INDO-EUROPEAN MOTHER-TRIBE. 207 


thoroughly compared and analyzed, and especially when the 
establishment of a true scheme of degrees of relationship 
among the branches shall reduce the doubt now thrown over 
the primitiveness of a term by its absence from the languages 
of some among them. 

By this kind of research, then, it is found that the primi. 
tive tribe which spoke the mother-tongue of the Indo. 
European family was not nomadic alone, but had settled 
habitations, even towns and _ fortified places, and addicted 
itself in part to the rearing of cattle, in part to the cultivation 
of the earth. It possessed our chief domestic animals—the 
horse, the ox, the sheep, the goat, and the swine, besides the 
dog: the bear and the wolf were foes that ravaged its flocks ; 
the mouse and fly were already its domestic pests. The 
region it inhabited was a varied one, not bordering upon the 
ocean, ‘The season whose name has been most persistent is 
the winter. Barley, and perhaps also wheat, was raised for 
food, and converted into meal. Mead was prepared from 
honey, as a cheering and inebriating drink. The use of 
certain metals was known; whether iron was one of them 
admits of question. The art of weaving was practised ; wool 
and hemp, and possibly flax, being the materials employed. 
Of other branches of domestic industry, little that is definite 
can be said ; but those already mentioned imply a variety of 
others as codrdinate or auxiliary to them. The weapons of 
offence and defence were those which are usual among 
primitive peoples, the sword, spear, bow, and shield. Boats 
were manufactured, and moved by oars. Of extended and 
elaborate political organization no traces are discoverable: 
the people was doubtless a congeries of petty tribes, under 
chiefs and leaders, rather than kings, and with institutions of 
a patriarchal cast, among which the reduction to servitude of 
prisoners taken in war appears not to have been wanting. 
The structure and relations of the family are more clearly 
seen; names of its members, even to the second and third 
degrees of consanguinity and affinity, were already fixed, and 
were significant of affectionate regard and trustful interde- 
pendence, That woman was looked down upon, as a being 
in capacity and dignity inferior to man, we find no indication 


203 ORIGINAL INDO-EUROPEAN CULTURE. 


whatever. The art of numeration was learned, at least up to 
a hundred; there is no general Indo-European word for 
‘thousand.’ Some of the stars were noticed and named: 
the moon was the chief measurer of time. The religion was 
polytheistie, a worship of the personified powers of nature. 
Its rites, whatever they were, were practised without the aid 
of a priesthood. 

Such, in briefest possible description, was the simple people 
from whom appear to have descended those mighty nations 
who have now long been the leaders of the world’s civiliza- 
tion. Of their classification, their importance in history, and 
the value of their languages to linguistic science, we shall 
treat further in the next lecture. 


LECTURE VI. 


Languages and literatures of the Germanic, Slavonic, Lithuaniec, Ue.tis, 
Italic, Grevk, Iranian, and Indian branches of Indo-European speech, 
Interest of the family and its study; historical importance of the Indo- 
European races; their languages the basis of linguistic science. 
Method of linguistic research. Comparative philology. Errors of 
linguistic method or its application. 


Our consideration of the processes of linguistic growth, 
and of their effects upon the condition of language and the 
rise of discordant tongues, was brought to a close in the 
preceding lecture with a brief discussion of certain errone- 
ous views respecting original dialectic variety, and the 
influence exerted upon it by literary and grammatical culti- 
vation. We then looked to see how and how far the princi- 
ples which we had established could be applied to explain 
the seemingly infinite confusion of tongues now prevailing 
upon the earth, and to facilitate their classification and 
reduction to order. This led us to a recognition of our own 
language as one of a group of nearly related dialects, the 
Germanic group; and, on inquiring farther, we found that 
this was itself a member of a wider family, embracing nearly 
all the tongues of Europe, with a part of those of Asia, and 
divided into seven principal branches: namely, the Indian, 
the Iranian, the Greek, the Latin, the Germanic, the 
Slavonic (including the Lithuanic, sometimes reckoned as a 
separate branch), and the Celtic. We called it the Indo- 
European family. At some place and time, which we were 


obliged to confess ourselves unable to determine with any 
14 


210 MEMBERS OF THE [LECT 


even tolerable degree of confidence—but more provably im 
Asia, and certainly not less than three thousand years before 
Christ—and in a condition of civilization respecting which 
the evidence of language furnisbed us valuable hints, some 
single community had spoken a single tongue, from which 
all these others were descended, in accordance with the 
universal laws of linguistic tradition, by processes which are 
still active in every part of human speech. And now, waiv- 
ing for a while the question whether it may not be possible 
to regard the great Indo-European family itself as only a 
member of a yet vaster family, including all or nearly allthe 
languages of the human race, we have, in the present lecture, 
to review more in detail its constitution, to note the period 
and locality of its constituent members, to glance at the special 
historical importance attaching to them and to the peoples 
who speak them, to set forth their value as the funda- 
mental material of linguistic science, and to examine anew 
and more systematically the general method of linguistic 
research, as established upon their study. ° 

We may best commence our survey of the varieties of 
Indo-European speech with our own branch, the Germanic. 
Its existing dialects, as has been already pomted out, are 
divided into three groups or sub-branches: 1, the Low-Ger- 
man, occupying northern Germany and the Netherlands, 
with their colony Britain, and with the numerous and 
widely-scattered modern colonies of Britain; 2, the High- 
German, in central and southern Germany ; 3, the Scandina- 
vian, in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland. Of the 
Low-German group, the English is by far the most important 
member ; its eventful history, illustrated at every step by 
valuable literary documents, we trace back, through Middle 
English (a.p. 1850-1550), Old English (a.p. 1250-1350), and 
Semi-Saxon (a.D. 1150-1250), to the Anglo-Saxon, which 
reaches into the seventh century of our era, possessing an anti- 
quity exceeded by only one other Germanic dialect. Its 
earliest monuments, in their style and metre, and at least one 
of them, the Beowulf, in subject and substance also, carry us 
back to the pre-Christian period of Germanic history. We 
cannot delay here to enter into any detailed examination 


tial 


vi. ] GERMANIC BRANCH. 211° 


of the character and changes of English speech, interesting 
and instructive as such a task would be; save so far as they 
have been and may hereafter be brought in by way of illus- 
tration of general linguistic laws, they must be left to more 
special treatises.* 

Next of kin with the Anglo-Saxon, or oldest form of Eng- 
lish, are the ancient Frisian, of the northern sea-coast of 
Germany, which had, in the fourteenth century and later, 
a literature of its own, of juridical content, composed in 
an idiom of form little less antique than Old High-German, 
notwithstanding its comparatively modern. date —and the 
Old Saxon, the principal language of northern Germany be- 
tween the Rhine and the Elbe, represented to us by but 
a single work, the Heliand or ‘Saviour,’ a poetical life of 
Christ, probably of the ninth century. Both Saxon and 
Frisian have been almost wholly crowded out of cultivated 
use in modern times, as was explained in a former lecture 
(see p. 164), by the overpowering influence of the High 
German, and their domain has also been encroached upon by 
other dialects of the same kindred, so that they survive 
at present only as insignificant popular patois. Nothing but 
the political independence of Holland has saved its peculiar 
speech from the same fate: the literary cultivation of the 
Netherlandish or Dutch can be traced back to the thirteenth 
century, although dating chiefly from the sixteenth, the era 
f the country’s terrible struggle against the political tyranny 
of Spain. The Flemish, the closely allied idiom of Flanders, 
has its own separate records, of about the same antiquity, 
but is now nearly extinct. 

The history of High-German speech was succinctly 
sketched in connection with our inquiries into the rise and 
extension of literary dialects. It falls into three periods, 
The first period is that of the Old High-German (Althoch- 
deutsch), from the eighth to the twelfth century ; its monu- 
ments are tolerably abundant, but, with trifling exceptions, of 
Christian origin and religious content : they represent three 

* See the works of Marsh, Craik, and others ; and especially, for a clear and 
succinct view of the history and connections of English speech, with gram- 
matical analyses and illustrative specimens, the work of Professor Hadley, 


already once eferred to, on p, 84. 
14% 


212 MEMBERS OF THE [LECT. 


principal sub-dialects, the Frankish, the Alemannic and 
Swabian, and the Bavarian and Austrian. The second 
period, that of the Middle High-German (Aiittelhochdeutsch), 
covers about four centuries, beginning with the twelfth and 
ending with the fifteenth ; its ruling dialect is the Swabian ; 
and its rich literature hands down to us valuable productions 
of the poetical fancy of the times, in the lyric verses of the 
Minnesingers, and precious memorials of ancient German 
national tradition, in the heroic legends (Heldensagen). The 
foremost work of the latter class, the Lay of the Nibelungen 
(Nibelungenlied), is one of the noblest epics which any coun- 
try has produced, in any age of the world. Of the language 
and literature of the New High-German period, from early 
in the sixteenth century to our own times—the “ German” 
language and literature, as we are accustomed to call it— 
there is no need that I speak more particularly. 

The third subdivision of the Germanic’ branch is the 
Scandinavian. Its earliest monuments come to us from Ice- 
land, that far-off and inhospitable island of volcanoes, boiling 
springs, and ice-fields, which, settled in the ninth century by 
refugees from Norway, long continued a free colony, a home 
of literary culture and legendary song. Christianity, more 
tolerant there than elsewhere on Germanic soil, did not sweep 
from existence the records of ancient religion and customs. 
The two Eddas, gathered or preserved to us from the twelfth 
and thirteenth centuries, are, in virtue of their tone and 
content, by far the most primitive works in the whole circle 
of the Germanic literatures, documents of priceless value for 
the antiquity of the Germanic race. Their language also, 
though of so much more recent date than the oldest Anglo- 
Saxon and High-German, is not exceeded by either in respect 
to the primitiveness of its phonetic and grammatical form. 
Nor has it greatly changed during the six or seven centuries 
which have elapsed since the compilation of the Eddas. The 
modern Icelandic is still, among all the existing Germanic 
tongues, the one that has preserved and possesses the most 
of that original structure which once belonged to them all 
alike. Three other dialects, the Norwegian, the Swedish, 
and the Danisn, constitute along with it the Scandinavian 


VI. | GERMANIC BRANCH. 213 


group, and are languages of literary culture. They are not 
direct descendants of the “ Old Norse” tongue, as the ancient 
Icelandic is usually called: the Norwegian comes nearest to 
being so; the others represent more ancient dialectic divi- 
sions of Scandinavian speech. 

How many other Germanic branches, originally coordinate 
with the three we have described, once had existence, but 
have become extinct in later times, by the extinction of the 
communities who spoke them, we have not, nor shall we ever 
have, any means of knowing. But of one such, at least, 
most precious remains have escaped the general destruction 
of the nationality to which it belonged. One portion of 
the western division of the great and famous Gothic nation 
crossed the lower Danube, some time in the early part of the 
fourth century, and settled in the Roman province of Meesia, 
as subjects of the empire and as Christians. For them, 
their bishop and leader, Ulfilas, later in the same century, 
made a translation into their own vernacular of nearly the 
whole Bible, writing it in an alphabet of his own devising, 
founded on the Greek. Five hundred years afterward, the 
Gothic was everywhere an extinct tongue ; but considerable 
portions of the Gothie Scriptures—namely, a part of the 
Gospels, Paul’s epistles nearly complete, and fragments of 
the Old Testament—are happily still preserved, in a single 
manuscript of the fifth century, now at Upsala, in Sweden. 
Scanty as these relics may be, they are of inestimable value 
in illustrating the history of the whole Germanic branch of 
Indo-European language, and bridging over the distance 
which separates it from the other branches. For, as in time, 
so still more notably in material and structure, their idiom 
is much the most ancient of all the varied forms of Germanic 
speech: it is not, indeed, the mother of the rest, nor of any 
among them; but it is their eldest sister, and fully entitled 
to claim the place of head of their family. 

The Slavonian branch—to which, on account of its local 
vicinity, as well as its probable nearer relationship, to the 
Germanic, we next turn our attention—need not occupy us 
long. It is of much less interest to us, because of its greater 
remoteness from our race and from our knowledge, its inferior 


214 THE SLAVONIC BRANCH. [ LECT. 


historical importance and literary value, and its more modern 
appearance.* The oldest of its dialects in date, and, in nearly 
all respects, the most primitive in form, is the language of 
the ancient Bulgarians, into which their apostle Cyril trans- 
lated the Scriptures, now just about a thousand years ago. 
It is a curious coincidence that our knowledge of both Ger- 
manic and Slavonic speech thus begins, like that of many a 
rude and hitherto unlettered dialect in the hands of mission- 
aries at the present day, with a Bible version, and at nearly 
the same geographical locality; the kingdom of the Bulgarians 
having followed that of the Goths on the southern bank of 
the lower Danube. But this ancient idiom—tfrom which the 
modern Bulgarian differs greatly, having changed with 
unusual rapidity in the interval—is more commonly called the 
Old Slavonic, or the Church Slavic, having been adopted by 
a large part of the Slavonian races as their sacred language 
and being still employed as such, within the ecclesiastical 
limits of the Greek Church. It belongs to what is known as 
the south-eastern section of the Slavonie branch. By far the 
most important of the other languages in the same section 18 
the Russian, in its two divisions, the Russian proper and the 
Little-Russian, or Ruthenian. The Russian is in our day a 
literary language of considerable importance ; its forms are 
traceable, in scanty documents, back into the eleven th century. 
In its cultivated development, it has been strongly influenced 
by the Church Slavonic. The south-eastern section further 
includes the Servian, with its closely related dialect, the 
Kroatian, and the Slovenian of Carinthia and Styria. 
Specimens of these tongues are as old as the tenth, or even 
the ninth, century. The Servian has an interesting modern 
literature of popular songs. 

To the other section, the western, belong the Polish, the 
Bohemian with the related Moravian and Slovakian, the 
upper and lower Sorbian, and the Polabian, on the Elbe. Of 
these, the Bohemian is the oldest, having monuments probably 
of the tenth century. Polish literature begins in the four- 

* In sketching the relations of the Slavonic languages, I follow the 


authority of Professor August Schleicher, in the Beitrage zur Vergleichender 
Sprachforschung, vol. 1., p. 1 seg. 


vi. ] THE LITHUANIC GROUP. 215 


teenth century, since, down to that time, the cultivated of 
the nation had written wholly in Latin. The others can 
show nothing older than the sixteenth century, and are of 
little consequence in any aspect. 

The Lithuanic or Lettic group of dialects is sometimes 
treated as a subdivision of the Slavonic, and sometimes—per- 
haps with better reason—as a separate branch, codrdinate 
with the other, although very closely related to it. It is of 
very slight historical or literary importance: its interest lies 
chiefly in the fact that, under the operation of causes in its 
history which are yet unexplained and probably unexplain- 
able, it has preserved many of the original forms of Indo- 
European speech in a more uncorrupted condition than any 
other known dialect of the whole family which is not as much 
as two thousand years older. It is composed of only three 
dialects, one of which, the Old Prussian, the original lan- 
guage of the inhabitants of north-eastern Prussia, has been 
extinct for two hundred years, crowded out of existence by 
the Low-German, and leaving behind, as its only monument, 
a brief catechism. The other two, the Lithuanian and the 
Lettish, or Livonian, are still spoken by a million or two of 
people in the Russian and Prussian provinces bordering on 
the Baltic, but seem destined to give way helplessly before 
the encroachments of the German and Russian, and to share 
one day the fate of their sister-dialect. The oldest Lithu- 
anian document dates from the middle of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. The southern or High Lithuanian is of most antique 
form; the Low Lithuanian, and yet more notably the Lettish 
to the north, show a less remarkable conservation of ancient 
material. 

The Celtic languages, as was pointed out in the last lee- 
ture, have been well-nigh extinguished by the Romanie and 
Germanic tongues, and now only lurk in the remotest and 
most inaccessible corners of the wide territory which they 
once occupied in Europe. The Scotch Highlands, the wildest 
parts of Ireland, the Isle of Man, the mountains of Wales, 
the rough glens of Cornwall, and the land lying nearest to 
Cornwall across the British Channel, the promontory of 
Brittany, are the ouly regions where, for many centuries 


216 MEMBERS OF THE "LECT. 


past, Celtic speech has been heard. The Cornish, too, has 
become extinct within the memory of the present generation ; 
the Irish is rapidly on its way to the same fate; the Gaelic 
wil] not survive the complete taming and aiyslieaeued of the 
Highlands ; the French is likely to crowd out the patois of 
the Breton peasant; and it is greatly to be doubted whether 
even the Welsh people, passionate as is the attachment with 
which at present they cling to their peculiar speech, will 
coutinue alw ays to refuse the advantages that would accrue 
to them from its relinguishment, and a more thorough fusion 
with the greater community of speakers of English to which 
they form an adjunct. There has never been a homogeneous, 
independent, and cultivated Celtic state, capable of protect- 
ing its idiom from the encroachment of cther tongues; and 
only such protection, now unattainable, can, as it seems, save 
Celtic speech from utter extinction. 

There is no small difficulty in treating satisfactorily the 
documents which illustrate the history of the Celtic lan- 
guages, owing to the prevalence of a peculiar and strongly- 
marked linguistic disease, well known among philologists as 
“ Celtomania,” which has been very apt to attack students of 
the subject—especially such as were of Celtic extraction, but 
in some degree foreigners also—leading them wildly to ex- 
aggerate the antiquity and importance ‘of the Celtic civiliza- 
tion, language, and literature. We have had Celtic set up 
as the most primitive and uncorrupted of tongues, spoken by 
generations long anterior to the oldest worthies whom history, 
sacred or profane, recognizes, and furnishing the only sure 
foundation to universal ‘etymology ; ; we have “had ancient in- 
scriptions and difficult texts, of the most diverse origin and 
distant locality, explained out of Celtic into high-sounding 
phrases, of true Oakting ring; we have had the obscure 
words of various languages traced to Celtic roots, provided 
with genealogies from an Trish or Welsh ancestor—and much 
more of the same sort. Sober and unprejudiced inquiry cuts 
down these claims to greatly reduced, though still respect- 
able, dimensions, 

So completely were the Gaulish dialects of northern Italy, 
France, and Spain wiped out by the Latin, so few traces of 


vr ! CELTIC BRANCH. 217 


them are left to us, either in the later idioms of the Latin or 
in fragments of PERE inscriptions, and coins, that it is 
still a matter of doubt and question among Celtic scholars to 
wuich of the known divisions of Celtic speech, the Gadhelic 
or the Cymric, they belonged, or whether they did not con- 
stitute a third division, codrdinate with these. Aside from 
the exceedingly scanty and obscure Gallic epigraphical 
monuments, and the few single words preserved in classic 
authors, the earliest records, both of Irish and Welsh speech, 
are glosses, or interlinear and marginal versions and com- 
ments, written by Celtic scholars upon manuscripts which 
they were studying, in old times when Wales and Ireland, 
especially the Jaiber, were centres of a lively literary ania 
Christian activity. Of these glosses, the Irish are by far the 
most abundant, and afford a tolerably distinct idea of what 
the language was at about the end of the eighth century. 

here is also an independent literary work, a life of Saint 
Patrick, which is supposed to belong to the beginning of the 
ninth century. The other principal Gadhelic dialect, the 
Scotch Gaelic, presents us a few songs that claim to be of the 
sixteenth century. The Ossianic poems, which excited such 
attention a bundred years ago, and whose genuineness and 
value have been the subject of so lively discussion, are prob- 
ably built upon only a narrow foundation of real Gaelic 
tradition. 

In the Cymric division, the Welsh glosses, just referred 
to, are the oldest monuments of definite date. Though 
hardly, if at all, less ancient than the Irish, coming down 
from somewhere between the eighth and the tenth centuries, 
they are very much more scanty in amount, hardly sufficient 
to do more than disprove the supposed antiquity ef the 
earliest monuments of the language that possess a proper 
literary character. For long centuries past, the Welsh bards 
have sung in spirit-stirring strains the glories and the woes 
of their race ; and it is claimed that during much more than 
a thousand years, or ever since the sixth century, the era of 
Saxon invasion and conquest, some of their songs have been 
handed down from generation to generation, by a careful 
and uninterrupted tradition, And the claim is probably well 


218 MEMBERS OF THE [ LECT, 


founded : only it is also pretty certain that, as they have 
been handed down, they have been modernized in diction, 
so that, in their present form, they represent to us the 
Welsh language of a time not much preceding the date of 
the oldest manuscripts, or of the twelfth to the fourteenth 
centuries. The later Welsh literature, as well as the Irish, 
is abundant in quantity. The Cornish, also, has a tolerably 
copious literature of not far from the same age; its earliest 
monument, a Latin-Cornish vocabulary, may be as old as the 
twelfth century. The language of Brittany, the Armorican 
—which is so closely allied with the two last-mentioned that 
it cannot well be regarded as a remnant and representative 
of the Celtic dialects of Gaul, but must rather belong to 
colonists or fugitives from Britain—is recorded in one or 
two brief works going back to the fourteenth century, or 
even farther. 

We come next to the Romanic branch, as we have called 
it when briefly noticing its history at an earlier point in our 
discussions. Of the languages which compose it, and whose 
separate currents of linguistic tradition we trace backward 
until they converge and meet in the Latin, two, the Rheto- 
Romanic in southern Switzerland and at the head of the 
Adriatic, and the Wallachian of the northern provinces of 
Turkey, have no literature of any antiquity or independent 
value. The other five—the Italian, French, Provengal, 
Spanish, and Portuguese—all emerged out of the condition 
of vulgar patois, and began to take on the character of 
national cultivated languages, at not far from the same time, 
or in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. There 
are fragments of French texts dating from the tenth century, 
but the early French literature, abundant and various, and, 
im its romances, attaining a wonderfully sudden and general 
popularity throughout cultivated Europe, belongs to the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Provencal poetry, 
consisting of the songs of the troubadours, whose chief 
activity was displayed at the court of Toulouse, in southern- 
most France, was wholly lyrical in form, and amatory oF 
satirical in content: it finished its brilliant but brief career, 
of about three hundred years, in the fourteenth century. The 


vi. | ROMANIC OR ITALIC BRANCH. 219 


culture of Italian begins at the court of Frederic IT., about 
A.D. 1200, and within a century and a half of that time lived, 
sang, and narrated the three greatest writers of Italy—Dante 
(ob. 13821), Petrarch (ob. 1374), and Boccaccio (ob. 1875). 
The Spanish heroic legend commences in the twelfth century ; 
and there are monuments of Portuguese speech of about 
the same time. Among these languages, the French is that 
which has undergone most change during the historical © 
period; the oldest French and Provengal form a kind of 
middle term between the modern language and the ancient 
Latin, illustrating the transition from the latter to the 
former. 

But if we have called the branch of Indo-European speech 
to which these tongues belong the Romanic, we have done so 
out of regard to its later history and present constitution, 
and not altogether properly. To the student of Indo- 
European philology, these are the recent branchings of a 
single known stock, the Latin; to trace their development 
is a task of the highest interest, a whole linguistic school in 
itself; they furnish rich and abundant illustration of all the 
processes of linguistic growth: but, as regards any direct 
bearing upon the history of Indo-European speech, they have 
value only through the Latin, their common parent. .The 
remoter relations of the Latin itself receive light from various 
sources. In its familiar classic form, it represents to us the 
speech of the learned and educated Romans of a century or 
two before the Christian era; it is somewhat refined by 
literary culture from the diction of the oldest authors whose ~ 
works have come down to us, in fragments or entire—as 
Livius Andronicus, Plautus, Terence—and is far more notably 
changed from the language of earlier Roman times—as is 
shown by the yet extant monuments, like the inscription on 
the Duilian column (about B.c. 260), that on the sarcophagus 
of a founder of the Scipio family (a little older than the last 
mentioned), and especially the Salian hymn and song of the 
fratres arvales, of yet earlier but uncertain date, in which 
the best Latin scholar would find himself wholly at fault 
without the traditional interpretation which is handed down 
along with them: in these monuments is preserved to us 


22 THE ITALIC BRANCH. [ LECT. 


many an antique form, giving valuable hints respecting the 
grammatical and phonetic development of the language. 
Their evidence is supplemented in a very important manner 
by that of other kindred Italian dialects. The Oscan or 
Opican of southern Italy was the language of the Samnites 
and their allies, from whose hands Rome wrung after a 
severe and often doubtful struggle the dominion of the pen- 
insula: it was not disused as the official speech of some of 
the southern provinces until less than a hundred years before 
Christ ; and coins and inscriptions dating from the two or 
three preceding centuries still teach us something of its 
structure and character. The Umbrian, the tongue of 
north-eastern Italy, is yet more fully represented to us by 
the Euguvine tablets, inscribed with the prayers and cere- 
monial rules of a fraternity of priests, and supposed to be as 
old as the third and fourth centuries before our era. Of the 
Volscian dialect, also, and the Sabine or Sabellian—the 
former being more akin with the Umbrian, the latter with 
the Latin—some exceedingly scanty relics have been dis- 
covered. The interpretation and comprehension of all these 
—resting, as it does, solely upon comparison with the Latin 
and other more distantly related tongues—is at present, and 
is likely always to remain, incomplete and doubtful; but 
they are of essential importance, both in explaining some of 
the peculiarities of the Latin, and in fixing’ its position as 
one of a group of kindred dialects oceupying the greater 
portion of the Italian peninsula, and hence most suitably to 
be denominated the Italic group. The theory that the Latin 
was produced by a mixture of somewhat discordant elements 
—of Roman, Sabine, and Osean; or of these and Etrusean 
—hbrought together by historical circumstances, and finally 
fused into homogeneousness, is one which belonged to a 
former stage of linguistic science, and is now rejected as 
uncalled-for and groundless. Yet more untenable, and 
wanting even a semblance of foundation, is the derivation of 
Latin from Greek, a favourite dogma of times not long past. 
but at present abandoned by every comparative philologist 
whose opinion is of the slightest value. 

In the Greek language, we reach an antiquity in the 


v1. | THE GREEK BRANCH. 221 


recorded history of Indo-European speech considerabiy higher 
than we have anywhere else attained. The exact datu of its 
earliest monuments, the grand and unrivalled poems of 
Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey, cannot, it is true, be de- 
termined ; but they go back, doubtless, to near the beginning 
of the thousand years before Christ’s birth. From the 
different parts of Greece, too, as of Italy, we have received 
records of dialects that subsisted side by side through all the 
earlier periods of the country’s history, until at length (about 
B.C. 800) the political importance and superior literature of 
Athens made her idiom, the later Attic, the common lan- 
guage of cultivated Greeks everywhere. The earlier 
Attic is found first in the writings of the great dramatists, 
beginning about five centuries before Christ: it is more 
nearly akin with the earlier Ionic of Homer and Hesiod (be- 
fore 700 B.c.), and the later Ionic of Herodotus (about 400 
B.C.), than with the Doric of Aleman, Pindar, and Theocritus 
(600-250 B.c.), or the Molic of Alezus and Sappho (about 
600 B.c.). The differences of the Greek dialects are quite 
insignificant as compared with those of the Italic, yet they 
are of no small service to the historical student of the Greek 
language, since each brings to his knowledge some elements 
less corrupted and modernized than are to be found in the 
others, or in the later common tongue. 

The modern Greek has also its dialects, respecting which 
little is known in detail; and it has, besides, its common 
tongue, the Romaic (as it is ordinarily styled), spoken and 
written by all the educated Greeks of the present day. This 
Romaic is very much less altered from the ancient classic 
language, as spoken by Plato and Demosthenes, than are the 
modern Romanic languages from the speech of Virgil and 
Cicero. The difference of the two is even so slight that 
a party in Greece are now engaged in making the somewhat 
pedantic and utopian effort to eliminate it altogether, to 
make the turbulent population of the present petty and in- 
significant kingdom talk and write as did their heroic fore- 
fathers, when, though feeble in numbers, they were the fore- 
most community of the world. Small result is to be looked 
for from this experiment ; should it prove successful, it will 


222 MEMBERS OF THE [LEcT. 


be the first time that such a thing has been accomplished in 
all +he history of language. 

Of the Asiatic branches of our family, the one which lies 
nearest us, the Iranian, or Persian, may first engage our atten- 
tion. Its oldest monuments of svelle Rebcurdi ped ae are the 
inscriptions—cut on the surface of immense walls of living 
rock, in the so-called cuneiform characters—by which thie 
Achemenidan sovereigns of Persia, Darius, Xerxes, and their 
successors, made imperishable record for posterity of their 
names and deeds. Fifty years ago, these inscriptions were 
an unsolved and apparently insoluble enigma; now, by a 
miracle of human ingenuity and patience, not without the 
aid of a combination of favouring circumstances wholly im- 
possible at any earlier period, almost every word and every 
character is fully laid open to our comprehension, and they 
have been made to yield results of great value both to 
linguistic and to national history. The oldest of them come 
from a time about five centuries before Christ, and their ex- 
tent is sufficient to give us a very distinct idea of the lan- 
guage of those Persians against whom the Greeks so long 
fought, first for independence, then for empire. 

Of about the same age, and even, probably, in part con- 
siderably older, are the. sacred Scriptures of the religion 
established by Toro tetin (in his own tongue, si aie 


the book called the Av esta, or Zend-Av éatal ‘he dialect in 


which these writings are composed goes ».sually by the name 
of the Zend; it is also styled the Aiea’ and sometimes 
the Old Pisieney from the country Bactria, the north-eastern- 
most region of the great Iranian territory, which is supposed 
to have been its specific locality. They have been preserved 
to us by the Parsis of western India, who fled thither from 
their native country after its reduction under Mohammedan 
vassalage in the seventh century of our era, and who have 
ever since faithfully maintained, under Hindu and British 
protection, the rites of the Magian faith, the pure worship 
of Ormuzd (Ahura-Mazda, ‘the mighty spirit’) through the 
symbol of fire. The Avesta shows two dialects, a younger 
and an older; some of its hymns and prayers possibly go 
back to the time of Zoroaster himself—whatever that may 


a ——— El 


VI. | IRANIAN BRANCH. 223 


have been: it was doubtless more than a thousand years, at 
least, before Christ—but the bulk of the work is considerably 
later. Accompanying the Avesta is a version of it, made for 
the use of the priests, in another and much more modern 
Tranian dialect, the Pehlevi or Huzvaresh, supposed to havo 
been the literary language of the westernmost provinces of 
fran at a period some centuries later than the Christian era, 
and much mixed wita inaterials derived from the Semitic 
tongues lying next westward, across the border. A few in- 
scriptions and legends of coins, of the early Sassanian 
monarcas (after A.D. 226), furnish further specimens of the 
same or a nearly kindred dialect. 

The general body of religious literature belonging to the 
Parsis of India contains tolerably copious documents of a 
somewhat younger and much purer Iranian dialect, usually 
styled the Parsi (sometimes also the Pazend). It comes, 
without much question, from a more eastern locality than 
the Pehlevi, and from a time nearly approaching that of the 
Mohammedan conquest. Finally, after the conquest, and 
when Persia was thoroughly made over into a province of 
the Moslem empire, arises, in the tenth century, the modern 
Persian, and becomes during several centuries, and even to 
our own day, the vehicle of an abundant and admirable 
literature, rich in every department, in poetry, fiction, history, 
philosophy, science. Its first great work, and almost or 
quite the greatest it has to offer us, is the Shah-Nameh, 
‘Book of Kings,’ of Firdusi (ob. 1020), a true national epic, 
grand in extent, noble in style, varied in contents, in which 
is summed up and related at length the history of the land, 
traditional, legendary, and mythological, as it lay in’ the 
ininds of the generation by whom was revived the ancient 
independence and glory of the Persian nationality. For the 
impoverishment of its grammar by the loss of ancient forms, 
the modern Persian is almost comparable with the English. 
It is more nearly related to the language of the Acheme- 
nidan inscriptions than to that of the Avesta, although not 
the lineal descendant and representative of either. In its 
later literary use, it is greatly disfigured by the unlimited 
introduction of words from the Arabic vocabulary. 


224 MEMBERS OF THE [LEcr. 


There are several other languages, in regions bordering on 
or included within the Iranian territory, which stand in such 
relations with those we have been describing as to be ranked 
in the same class, although their Iranian attributes are 
greatly obscured by the changes which have passed upon 
them since their separation from the principal stock. By 
far the most important of these is the Armenian, with an 
abundant literature going back to the fifth century, the era 
of the Christianization of the Armenian people. Others are 
the Ossetic, in the Caucasus; the Kurdish, the dialect of the 
wild mountaineers of the border lands between Persia, Turkey, 
and Russia; and the Afghan or Pushto, which in very recent 
times has enjoyed a certain degree of literary cultivation. 

We come, finally, to that member of our family which has 
lived its life within the borders of India. Not all the nu- 
merous dialects which fill this immense peninsula, between 
the impassable wall of the Himalayas and the Indian ocean, 
own kindred with the Indo-European tongues, but only those 
of its northern portion, of Hindustan proper, ranging from 
the Indus to the mouths of the Ganges, together with a 
certain extent of the sea-coast and its neighbourhood stretch- 
ing southward on either side. The central mountainous 
region and the table-lands of the Dekhan yet belong to the 
aboriginal tribes, who in the north were crowded out or 
subjugated, at a period lying only just beyond the ken of 
recorded history, by the Indo-European races, as they in- 
truded themselves through the avenue, the passes on the 
north-western frontier, by which the conquerors of India 
have in all ages found entrance. The principal modern 
dialects of our kindred are the Hindi, Bengali, and Mahratta, 
each with various subdivisions, and each with a literature of 
its own, running back only a few centuries. The Hindustani, 
or Urdu, is a form of the Hindi which grew up in the camps 
{irdi) of the Mohammedan conquerors of India, since the 
eleventh century, as medium of communication between them 
and the subject population of central Hindustan, more 
corrupted in form, and filled with Persian and Arabic words 
——being thus, as it were, the English of India: it has enjoyed 
more literary cultivation than any other of the recent dialects, 


VI. | INDIAN BRANCH. 225 


and is the lingua franca, the official language and means of 
genvral intercourse, throughout nearly the whole peninsula. 
The tongue of the roving Gypsies all over Europe, though 
everywhere strongly tinged with the local idiom of the region 
of their wanderings, is in its main structure and material a 
modern Hindu patois: the Gypsies are exiles from India. 

Next older than the languages we have mentioned are the 
Prakrit and the Pali, represented by a literature and inscrip- 
tions which come to us in part from before the Christian era. 
The Pali is the sacred language of the Buddhist religion in 
the countries lying eastward and south-eastward from India. 
The Prakrit dialects are chiefly preserved in the Sanskrit 
dramas, where the unlearned characters, the women, servants, 
and the like, talk Prakrit—just as, in a modern German 
theatre, one may hear the lower personages talk the dialects 
of their own districts, while the higher employ the literary 
German, the common speech of the educated throughout the 
country. 

The virtual mother of all these dialects is the Sanskrit. 
For the last twenty-five centuries, at least, the Sanskrit has 
been no longer a proper vernacular language, but kept arti- 
ficially in life, as the sacred dialect of Brahmanism and the 
cultivated tongue of literature and learning; thus occupying 
a position closely analogous with that held by the Latin 
since the decline of the western empire, as the language of 
Roman Catholicism,.and the means of communication among 
the learned of all Europe. It is still taught in the schools 
of the Brahmanic priesthood, used in the ceremonies of their 
religion, and spoken and written by their foremost scholars 
—-although, like the Latin in more recent times, much 
shaken in its sway by the uprise of the modern cultivated 
dialects, and the decadence of the religion with whose uses it 
is identified. We possess it in two somewhat varying forms, 
the classical Sanskrit, and the older idiom of the so-called 
Vedas, the Bible of the Hindu faith. The former is more 
aitered, by elaborate and long-continued literary and gram- 
matical training, from the condition of a true vernacular, than 
is almost any other known literary language. Partly for 


this reason, and partly because, at the time of its establish- 
15 


225 THE SANSKRIT LANGUAGE. [ LECT. 


ment and fixation as the learned tongue of all Aryan India, 
it must have been one among a number of somewhat differ- 
ing local varieties of Aryan speech, whose differences form a 
part of the discordance of the later dialects, I have called it 
above rather their virtual than their actual progenitor: it 
represents very closely the primitive stock out of which they 
have all grown, by varying internal development, and by 
varying influence and admixture of foreign tongues. When 
and where it was at first a spoken dialect, is out of our 
power to determine; but it cannot well be regarded as of 
less age than the earliest Greek records; and it is probably 
older by centuries. It possesses a most abundant literature, 
in nearly every department save. history ; its religious and 
ethical poetry, its epics, its lyric flights, its dramas, its sys- 
tems of philosophy and grammar, have been found worthy of 
high admiration and of profound study by Western scholars ; 
they have even been ranked by some, though very unjustly, 
as superior to the masterpieces of the Greek and Latin 
literatures. To fix the chronology of its separate works is a 
task of the extremest difficulty ; but some of them, even in 
their present form, and the substance of many others, cer- 
tainly come from a time considerably anterior to the Chris- 
tian era. } 

The Vedic dialect is yet more ancient; the earliest por- 
tions of the oldest collection, the Rig- Veda (‘ Veda of hymns’), 
must, it is believed, date from nearly ar quite two thousand 
years before Christ. The considerations from which this age 
is deduced for them are of a general and inexact character, 
yet tolerably clear in their indications. Thus, for example, 
the hymns of the Vedas were chiefly composed on the banks 
of the Indus and its tributaries, when the great valley of the 
Ganges was as yet unknown to the Aryan immigrants ; and 
they present the elephant as still a wondered-at and little- 
known animal: while the earliest tidings of India which we 
have from without show us great kingdoms on the Ganges, 
and the elephant reduced to the service of man, both in war 
and in peace. Buddhism, too, which is well known to have 
preceded by several centuries the birth of Christ, was a re- 
volt against the eppressive domination of the Brahmanic 


a a _. ™ 


vi. ] THE SANSKRIT LANGUAGE. 227 


hierarchy ; and in the Vedas are to be seen only the germs 
of Brahmanism, not yet developed: no hierarchy, no system 
of castes, no vestige of the doctrine of transmigration. The 
conclusions drawn from a study of the internal history and 
connection of the different classes of works composing the 
sacred literature of India—which follow one another, in a 
close succession of expositions, rules, and comments, from a 
time not much later than that of the more recent hymns 
down to the historical period—point also to the same age. 
The Vedas are thus by not less than a thousand years the 
earliest documents for the history of Indo-European lan- 
guage—for the history, moreover, of Indo-European condi- 
tions and institutions. The civil constitution, the religious 
rites, the mythologic fancies, the manners and customs, 
which they depict, have a peculiarly original and primitive 
aspect, seeming to exhibit a far nearer likeness to what once 
belonged to the whole Indo-European family than is any- 
where else to be attained. The Vedas appear rather like an 
Indo-European than an Indian record; they are the pro- 
perty rather of the whole family than of a single branch. 
Much of the same character appertains to the classical 
Sanskrit: it is both earlier in chronologic period and more 
primitive in internal character than any other language of 
the whole great family. Its peculiar value lies in its special 
conservation of primitive material and forms, in the transpar- 
ency of its structure, in its degree of freedom from the cor- 
rupting and disguising effects of phonetic change, from 
obliteration of original meaning and application. We must 
beware of supposing that at all points, in every item of 
structure, it is the superior of the other Indo-European 
tongues, or that it constitutes an infallible norm by which 
their material is to be judged; on the contrary, each of the 
other branches here and there excels it, offering some re- 
mains of early Indo-European speech which it has lost ; but 
to it must be fre@ly conceded the merit of having retained, 
out of the common stock, more than any one among them, 
almost more than they all. Exaggerated and unfounded 
claims are often put forward in its behalf by those who do 
not fully understand the true sources of its value: its 


» eee 


223 THE SANSKRIT LANGUAGE. [LECT | 


alphabet, though rich and very harmoniously developed, 
does not cover more than about two-thirds of our English 
system of spoken sounds ; as an instrument of the expression 
of thought it has very serious and conspicuous defects, being 


the Soaeraals in a loose and bald syntactical sri Soa 
and in an excessive use of compounds—not only to the 
Greek, but to almost every other cultivated Indo-European 
tongue ; nor (as has been already hinted) can its literature 
sustain a moment’s comparison with those of the classical 
languages. It is to be prized chiefly as a historical docu- 
ment, casting inestimable light upon the earliest develop- 
ment of the common speech of the Indo-European family, 
and the relations of its members. Had all its literature be- 
sides perished, leaving us only a grammar of its forms and a 
dictionary of its material, it would still in a great measure 
retain this character; were but a fragment of one of its texts 
saved, as has been the case with the Mceso-Gothie, it would 
still vindicate its right to a place at the head of all the lan- 
guages of the family. It may easily be appreciated, then, 
what an impulse to the historical study of language, then 
just struggling into existence by the comparison of the 
tongues of Europe, was given by the discovery and investiga- 
tion of this new dialect, having a structure that so invited 
and facilitated historic analysis, and even presented by the 
native grammatical science in an analyzed condition, with 
roots, themes, and affixes carefully separated, distinctly cata- 
logued, and defined in meaning and office. In all researches 
into the beginnings of Indo-European speech, the genesis of 
roots and forms, its assistance is indispensable, and its au- 
thority of greatest weight. It often has been and still is 
wrongly estimated and misapplied by incautious or ill-in- 
structed investigators ; it is sometimes treated as if it were 
the mother of the Indo-European dialects, as the Latin of the 
modern Romanic tongues, instead of merely their eldest sister, 


like the Mceso-Gothic among the Germanic languages ; it is 


unduly brought in to aid the inter-comparison of dialects of 
a single branch, and its peculiar developments, its special 
laws of euphony or construction, are sought to be forced upon 


ss eee eee > 


vI.} IMPORTANCE OF INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE, 229 


them; the facts it presents are erroneously accepted as ulti- 
mate, cutting off further inquiry; portions of its existing 
material which are of modern growth, or the artificial pro- 
ductions of Hindu scholasticism, are perversely used as 
of avail for Indo-European etymology: and such abuse has 
naturally provoked from some scholars a distrust of its 
genuine claims to regard: but, stripping off all exaggerations, 
and making all due allowances, the Sanskrit is still the main- 
stay of Indo-European philology ; it gave the science a rapid 
development which nothing else could have given; it im- 
parted to its conclusions a fulness and certainty which would 
have been otherwise unattainable. 

Such is the constitution of the grand division of human 
speech to which our own language belongs. That its limits 
have been everywhere traced with entire exactness cannot, 
of course, be claimed ; other existing dialects may yet make 
good their claim to be included in it—and it is beyond all 
reasonable question that, as many of its sub-branches have 
perished without leaving a record, so various of its branches, 
fully codrdinate with those we have reviewed, must have 
met a like fate. We may now proceed to glance briefly at 
some of the grounds of the preéminent importance with which 
‘it is invested. 

One source of the special interest which we feel in the 
study of Indo-European language lies in the fact that our 
own tongue is one of its branches. In the moral and intel- 
lectual world, not less than in the physical, everything cannot 
but appear larger in our eyes according as it is nearer to us. 
This would be a valid consideration with any race upon 
earth, since, for each, its own means of communication and 
instrument of thought is also the record of its past history, 
and must be its agency of future improvement in culture, 
and therefore calls for more study in order to its fuller com- 
prehension, and its development and elevation, than should be 
given to any other tongue, of however superior intrinsic value. 
But we are further justified in our somewhat exclusive interest 
by the position which our languages, and the races which speak. 
them, hold among other languages and races. It is true, 
as was claimed at the outset of these lectures, that linguistie 


250 HISTORY OF THE [LEOT, 


science, as a branch of human history, aims at universality, 
and finds the tongues of the humblest tribes as essential to 
her completeness as those of the most cultivated and gifted 
nations; but it is also true that, mindful of proportion, she 
passes more lightly over the one, to give her longer and 
more engrossed attention to the other. While the weal 
and woe of every individual that ever lived goes to make up 
the sum of human interests, with which our human nature 
both justifies and demands our sympathy, we cannot but lin- 
ger longest and with keenest participation over the fortunes 
of those who have played a great part among their fellows, 
whose deeds and words have had a wide and deep-reaching 
influence. And this is, in a very marked degree, the 
character of the Indo-European race. Its first entrance as 
an actor into what we are accustomed to call universal his- 
tory, or that drama of action and influence whose denouement 
is the culture of the modern European nations, was in the 
far Hast, in the Persian empire of Cyrus and his successors. 
This founded itself upon the ruins and relies of more ancient 
empires and cultures, belonging to other peoples, in part 
Semitic, in part of obseurer kindred. For the Indo-Eu- 
ropeans were, of all the great civilizing and governing races, 
the last to commence their career. Not only in Mesopo- 
tamia, but also in Egypt and China, the light of knowledge 
burned brightly, and great deeds were done, whereof the 
world will never lose the memory, while the tribes of our 
kindred were wandering savages, or weak and insignificant 
communities, struggling for existence. The Persian empire, 
in its conquering march westward, was first checked by one 
of these humble communities, the little jarring confederation 
of Greek states and cities, destined to become, notwithstand- 
ing its scanty numbers, the real founder of Indo-European 
preéminence. Greece, enriching itself with elements drawn 
from the decaying institutions of older races, assimilated 
them, and made them lively and life-giving, with an energy 
of genius unrivalled elsewhere in the annals of the world, 
The wider the range of our historical study, the more are we 
penetrated with the transcendent ability of the Greek race. 
In art, literature, and science, it has been what the Hebrew 


vI.] INDO-EUROPEAN RAGES. 231 


race has been in religion, and its influence has Veen hardly 
less unlimited, in space and in time. 

It seemed at one period, as is well known, that Greece 
would succeed to the imperial throne of Persia, subjecting 
the civilized world to her sway; but the prospect lasted but 
fora moment: the sceptre of universal dominion slipped 
from the hands of Alexander’s successors, and soon passed 
over into the keeping of another and younger branch of the 
same family. Rome, appropriating the fruits of Greek 
culture, and adding an organizing and assimilating force 
peculiarly her own, went forth to give laws to all nations, 
and to impose upon them a unity of civilization and of 
social and political institutions. And if Christianity was of 
Semitic birth, Greeks and Romans gave it universality. 
Rejected by the race which should have especially cherished 
it, it was taken up and propagated by the Indo-Europeans, 
and added a new unity, a religious one, to the forces by 
which Rome bound together the interests and fates of man- 
kind. 

Now came the turn of yet another branch, the Germanic. 
This had, indeed, only the subordinate part to play of aiding 
in the downfall of the old order of things, and preparing the 
way for a new and more vigorous growth. Its tribes ravaged 
Europe from east to west, and even to the farthest southern 
coasts, giving ruling class and monarch to nearly every 
country of the continent. But centuries of weakness and 
confusion were the first result of this great up-turning, and it 
even appeared for a time as if the dominion of the world 
were destined to be usurped by another race. The Semites, 
inspired with the furious zeal of a new religion, Moham- 
medanism, broke from their deserts and overran the fairest 
parts of Asia and Africa; and their conquering hosts en- 
tered Europe at either extremity, establishing themselves 
firmly, and pushing forward to take possession of the rest. 
They recoiled, at last, before the reviving might of the 
euperior race, and the last and grandest era of Indo-Bu- 
ropean supremacy began, the era in the midst of which we 
now live. For the past few centuries, the European nations 
have stood foremost, without a rival, in the world’s history. 


232 IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY [ LEC, 


They are the enlightened and the enlighteners of mankind, 
They alone are extending the sphere of human knowledge, 
investigating the nature of matter and of mind, and tracing 
out their exhibition in the past history and present condi- 
tion of the earth and its inhabitants. They alone have 
a surplus stock of intelligent energy, which is constantly 
pushing beyond its old boundaries, and spurns all limit to 
its action. The network of their activity embraces the 
globe ; their ships are in every sea between the poles, for 
exploration, for trade, or for conquest; the weaker races are 
learning their civilization, falling under their authority, 
or perishing off the face of the land, from inherent inability 
to stand before them. They have appropriated, and con- 
verted into outlying provinces of their race and culture, 
the twin world of the West, and the insular continent of the 
south-eastern seas, while their lesser colonies dot the whole 
surface of the inhabitable globe. They have inherited from 
its ancient possessors the sceptre of universal dominion, over 
a world vastly enlarged beyond that to which were limited 
the knowledge and the power of former times: and they are 
worthy to wield it, since their sway brings, upon the whole, 
physical well-being, knowledge, morality, and religion to 
those over whom it is extended. 

All that speciality of interest, then, which cleaves to histori- 
cal investigations respecting the origin, the earliest condi- 
tions, the migrations, the mutual intercourse and influence, 
and the intercourse with outside races, of that division of 
mankind which has shown itself as the most gifted, as pos- 
sessing the highest character and fulfilling the noblest 
destiny, among all who have peopled the earth since the 
first dawn of time, belongs, of right and of necessity, to 
Indo-European philology. 

It may, indeed, be urged that this is an interest lying 
somewhat apart from the strict domain of linguistic science, 
whose prime concern is with speech itself, not with the 
characters or acts of those who speak. Yet, as was pointed 
out in our first lecture, the study of language is not intro- 
spective merely ; they would unduly narrow its sphere and 
restrict its scope who should limit it to the examination of 


v1. | OF INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE. 233 


linguistic facts: these are so inextricably intertwined with 
historical facts, so dependent upon and developed out of 
them, that the two cannot be separated in consideration and 
treatment ; one chief department of the value of the science 
lies in its capacity to throw light upon the history of human 
races. The importance of the Indo-European races in 
history is, then, legitimately to be included among the 
titles of Indo-European philology to the first attention of 
the linguistic scholar. Moreover, since the relation between 
the capacity of a race and the character of the tongue 
originated and elaborated by that race is a direct and ne- 
cessary one, it could not but be the case that the speech 
of the most eminently and harmoniously endowed part of 
mankind should itself be of highest character and most 
harmonious development, and so the most worthy object of 
study, in its structure and its relations to mind and thought. 
And this advantage also, as we shall see more plainly here- 
after, is in fact found to belong to Indo-European language : 
in the classification of all human speech it takes, unchal- 
lenged, the foremost rank. 

But these considerations, weighty as they are, do not 
fully explain the specially intimate bond subsisting between 
general linguistic science and the study of Indo-European 
speech. Not only did the establishment of the unity of 
that family, and the determination of the relations of its 
members, constitute the most brilliant achievement of the 
new science ; they were also its foundation; it began with 
the recognition of these truths, and has developed with their 
elaboration, The reason is not difficult to discover: Indo. 
European language alone furnished such a grand body of 
related facts as the science needed for a sure basis. Its 
dialects have a range, in the variety of their forms and in 
the length of the period of development covered by them, 
which is sought elsewhere in vain, They illustrate the pro- 
cesses of linguistic growth upon an unrivalled scale, and 
from a primitive era to which we can make but an imperfect 
approach among the other languages of mankind. Portions 
of the Chinese literature, it is true, are nearly or quite as 
old as anything Indo-European, and the Chinese language, 


234 ANTIQUITY AND VARIETY [LEoT. 


as will be shown later, is in some respects more primitive 
in its structure than any other human tongue; but what it 
was at the beginning, that it has ever since remained, a 
solitary example of a language almost destitute of a history. 
Egypt has records to show of an age surpassing that of any 
other known monuments of human speech ; but they are of 
scanty and enigmatical content, and the Egyptian tongue 
also stands comparatively alone, without descendants, and 
almost without relatives. The Semitic languages come 
nearest to offering a worthy parallel; but they, too, fall far 
short of it. The earliest Hebrew documents are not greatly 
exceeded in antiquity by any others, and the Hebrew with 
its related dialects, ancient and modern, fills up a linguistic 
scheme of no small wealth; yet Semitic variety is, after all, 
but poor and scanty as compared with Indo-European; 
Semitic language possesses a toughness and rigidity of struc- 
ture which has made its history vastly less full of instructive 
change; and its beginnings are of unsurpassed obscurity. 
The Semitic languages are rather a group of closely kindred 
dialects than a family of widely varied branches: their 
whole yield to linguisti¢ science is hardly more than might 
be won from a single subdivision of Indo-European speech, 
like the Germanic or Romanic. “None of the other great 
races into which mankind is divided cover with their dialects, 
to any noteworthy extent, time as well as space; for the 
most part, we know nothing more respecting their speech 
than is to be read in its present living forms. Now it is so 
obvious as hardly to require to be pointed out, that a science 
whose method is prevailingly historical, which seeks to ar- 
rive at an understanding of the nature, office, and source 
of language by studying its gradual growth, by tracing out 
the changes it has undergone in passing from generation to 
generation, from race to race, must depend for the sound- 
ness of its methods and the sureness of its results upon the 
fulness of illustration of these historical changes furnished 
by the material of its investigations. It is true that the 
student’s historical researches are not wholly bafiled by the 
absence of older dialevts, with whose forms he may compare 
those of inore modern date. Something of the development 


v1. | OF INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE. 235 


of every language is indicated in its own structure with 
sufficient clearness to be read by analytic study. Yet more 
is to be traced out by means of the comparison of kindred 
contemporaneous dialects ; for, in their descent from their 
common ancestor, it can hardly be that each one will not 
have preserved some portion of the primitive material 
which the others have lost. 'Thus—to illustrate briefly by 
reference to one or two of our former examples—the iden- 
tity of our suffix Jy, in such words as godly and truly, with 
the adjective like might perhaps have been conjectured from 
the English alone ; and it is made virtually certain by com- 
parison with the modern German (gottlich, treulich) or 
Netherlandish (goddelijk, waarlyjk) ; it does not absolutely 
need a reference to older dialects, like the Anglo-Saxon or 
Gothic, for its establishment. Again, not only the Sanskrit 
and other ancient languages exhibit the full form asin, 
whence comes our Z am, but the same is also to be found 
almost unaltered in the present Lithuanian esmi. But, 
even if philological skill and acumen had led the student of 
Germanic language to the conjecture that I loved is origin. 
ally L love-did, it must ever have remained a conjecture 
only, a mere plausible hypothesis, but for the accident which 
caused the preservation to our day of the fragment of manu- 
script containing a part of Bishop Ulfilas’s Gothic Bible. 
And a host of points in the structure of the tongues of our 
Germanic branch which still remain obscure would, as we 
know, be cleared up, had we in our possession relics of them 
at a yet earlier stage of their separate growth. The extent 
to which the history of a body of languages may be pene- 
trated by the comparison of contemporary dialects alone will, 
of course, vary greatly in different cases ; depending, in the 
first place, upon the number, variety, and degree of relation 
of the dialects, and, in the second place, upon their joint 
and several measure of conservation of ancient forms: but 
it is also evident that the results thus arrived at for modern 
tongues will be, upon the whole, both scanty and dubious, 
compared with those obtained by comparing them with 
ancient dialects of the same stock. Occasionally, within the 
narrow limits of a single branch or group, the student 


236 INDO-EUROPEAN PHILOLOGY [LECT 


enjoys the advantage of access to the parent tongue itself, 
from which the more recent idioms are almost bodily de- 
rived: thus, for example, our possession of the Latin gives 
to our readings of the history of the Romanic tongues, our 
determination of the laws which have governed their growth, 
a vastly higher degree of definiteness and certainty than we 
could reach if we only knew that such a parent tongue must 
have existed, and had to restore its forms by careful com- 
parison and deduction. Next in value to this is the advan- 
tage of commanding a rich body of older and younger 
dialects of the same lineage, wherein the common speech is 
beheld at nearer and remoter distances from its source, so 
that we can discover the direction of its currents, and fill 
out with less of uncertainty those parts of their net- 
werk of which the record is obliterated. This secondary 
advantage we enjoy in the Germanic, the Persian, the 
Indian branches of Indo-European speech ; ; and, among the 
grander divisions of human language, we enjoy it to an 
extent elsewhere unapproached in the Indo-European 
family, that immense and varied body of allied forms of 
speech, whose lines of historic development are seen to cover 
a period of between three and four thousand years, as they 
converge toward a meeting in a yet remoter past. 

Herein lies the sufficient explanation of that intimate 
connection, that almost coincidence, which we have noticed 
between the dev elopment of Indo- Eur opean comparative phi- 
lology and that of the general science of language. In order 
t comprehend human language in every part, the student 
would wish to have its whole growth, in all its divisions and 
subdivisions, through all its phases, laid before him for in- 

spection in full authentic documents. Since, however, any- 
thing like this is impossible, he has done the best that lay 
within his power: he has thrown himself into that depart- 
ment of speech which had the largest share of its history 
thus illustrated, and by studying that has tried to learn how 
to deal with the yet more scanty and fragmentary materials 
rcs him in other departments. Here could be formed 

the desired nucleus of a science; here the general laws-of 
linguistic life could be discovered ; here could be worked 


vi. | AND THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. 237 


out those methods and processes which, with such modifica 
tions as the varying circumstances rendered necessary, 
should be applied in the investigation of other types of 
language also. The foundation was broad enough to build 
up a shapely and many-sided edifice upon. Yet the study 
of Indo-European language is not the science of language, 
Such is the diversity in unity of human speech that exclu- 
sive attention to any one of its types could only give us 
partial and false views of its nature and history. Endlessly 
as the dialects of our family appear to differ from one 
another, they have a distinct common character, which is 
brought to our apprehension only when we compare them 
with those of other stock; they are far from exhausting the 
variety of expression which the human mind is capable of 
devising for its thought; the linguist who trains himself in 
them alone will be liable to narrowness of vision, and will 
stumble when he comes to walk in other fields. We claim 
only that their inner character and outer circumstances 
combine to give them the first place in the regard of the 
linguistic scholar ; that their investigation will constitute in 
the future, as it has done in the past, a chief object of his 
study ; and that their complete elucidation is both the most 
attainable and the most desirable and rewarding «bject pro- 
posed to itself by linguistic science. 

The general method of linguistic research has already been 
variously set forth and illustrated, in an incidental way; but 
a summary recapitulation of its principles, with fuller refer- 
ence to the grounds on which they are founded, will not be 
amiss at this point in our progress. The end sought by the 
scientific investigator of language, it will be remembered, is 
not a mere apprehension and exposition, however full and 
systematic, of the phenomena of a language, or of all human 
speech—of its words, its forms, its rules, its usages: that is 
work for grammarians and lexicographers. He strives to 
discover the why of everything : why these words, these 
affixes, have such and such meanings ; why usage is thus, 
and not otherwise ; why so many and such words and forms, 
and they only, are found in a given tongue—and go on, in 
ever farther-reaching inquiry, back even to the question, 


238 HISTORICAL METHOD. [LEC's, 


why we speak at all. And since it appears that every ex- 
isting or recorded dialect, and every word composing it, is 
the altered successor, altered in both form and meaning, of 
some other and earlier one; since all known language has 
been made what it is, out of something ‘more original, by 
action proceeding from the minds of those who have used 
it, its examination must be conducted historically, like that 
of any other institution which has had a historic growth and 
development. All human speech has been during long ages 
modified, was even perhaps in the first place produced, by 
human capacities, as impelled by human necessities and 
governed by human circumstances; it has become what 
these influences by their gradual action have made it: it, on 
the one hand, is to be understood only as their product ; 
they, on the other hand, are to be read in the effects which 
they have wrought upon it. To trace out the transforma- 
tions of language, following it backward through its succes- 
sive stages even to its very beginnings, if we can reach so 
far ; to infer from the changes which it is undergoing and 
has undergone the nature and way of action of the forces 
which govern it; from these and from the observed charac- 
ter of its beginnings to arrive at a comprehension of its 
origin—such are the inquiries which occupy the attention 
of the linguistic scholar, and which must guide him to his 
ultimate conclusions respecting the nature of speech as an 
instrumentality of communication and of thought, and its 
value as a means of human progress. 

And as in its general character, so also in its details, the 
process of investigation is historical. We have already 
seen (lecture second, p. 54) that the whole structure of 
our science rests upon the study of individual words; the 
labours of the etymologist must precede aud prepare the” 
way for everything that is to follow. But every etymolo- 
gical question is strictly a historical one; it concerns the 
steps of a historical process, as shown by historical evi- 
dences ; it implies a judgment of the value of testimony, and a 
recognition of the truth fairly deducible therefrom. What 
is proved respecting the origin and changes of each particu- 
lar word by all the evidence within reach, is the etymolo- 


v1 ] ETYMOLOGY. 239 


gist’s ever-recurring inquiry. To answer it successfully, 
he needs a combination of many qualities; he must be, in 
fact, a whole court in himself: the acuteness, perseverance, 
and enterprise of the advocate must be his, to gather every 
particle of testimony, every analogy, every decision, bearing 
upon the case in hand; he must play the part of the op- 
posing counsel, in carefully sifting the collected evidence, 
testing the character and disinterestedness of the witnesses, 
c1oss-examining them to expose their blunders and inconsist- 
encies ; he must have, above all, the learning and candour of 
the judge, that he may sum up and give judgment impar- 
tially, neither denying the right which is fairly established, 
nor allowing that which rests on uncertain allegation and 
insufficient proof. In short, the same gifts and habits of 
mind which make the successful historian of events are 
wanted also to make the successful historian of words. 

The ill-repute in which etymology and those who follow 
it are held in common opinion is a telling indication of the 
difficulty attending its practice. The uncertainty and ar- 
bitrariness of its prevailing methods, the absurdity of its 
results, have been the theme of many a cutting and well- 
directed gibe. It has in all ages been a tempting occupa- 
tion to curious minds, and always a slippery one. An 
incalculable amount of human ingenuity has been wasted 
in its false pursuit. Men eminent for acuteness and sound 
judgment in other departments of intellectual labour have 
in this been guilty of folly unaccountable. It has been 
often remarked that the Greeks and Romans, when once 
engaged in an etymological inquiry, seem to have taken leave 
of their common sense. Great as were the advantages 
offered by the Sanskrit language to its native analysts, in 
the regularity of its structure and the small proportion of 
obscure words which it contained, they stumbled continually 
as soon as they left the plain track of the commonest and 
clearest derivations, and their religious, philosophical, and 
grammatical books are filled with word-genealogies as fanci- 
ful and unsound as those of the classic writers. In no one 
respect does the linguistic science of the present day show 
its radical superiority to that of former times more clearly 


240 THE COMPARATIVE METHOD [LEC? 


than in the style and method of its etymologies: upon 
these, indeed, is its superiority directly founded. 

The grand means, now, of modern etymological research 
is the extensive comparison of kindred forms. How this 
should be so appears clearly enough from what has been 
already taught respecting the growth of dialects and the 
genetical connections of languages. If spoken tongues stood 
apart from one another, each a separate and isolated entity, 
they would afford no scope for the comparative method. As 
such entities the ancient philology regarded them; or, if 
their relationship was in some cases recognized, it was 
wrongly apprehended and perversely applied—as when, for 
instance, the Latin was looked upon as derived from the 
Greek, and its words were sought to be etymologized out of 
the Greek lexicon, as corrupted forms of Greek vocables. 
In the view of the present science, while each existing dia- 
lect is the descendant of an older tongue, so other existing 
dialects are equally descendants of the same tongue. All 
have kept a part, and lost a part, of the material of their 
common inheritance; all have preserved portions of it in a 
comparatively unchanged form, while they have altered other 
portions perhaps past recognition. But, while thus agreed 
in the general fact and the general methods of change, they 
differ indefinitely from one another in the details of the 
changes effected. Each has saved something which others 
have lost, or kept in pristine purity what they have obscured 
or overlaid: or else, from their variously modified forms can be 
deduced with confidence the original whence these severally 
diverged. Every word, then, in whose examination the 
linguistic scholar engages, is to be first set alongside its 
correspondents or analogues in other related languages, that 
its history may be read aright. Thus the deficiencies of 
the evidence which each member of a connected group ‘of 
dialects contains respecting its own genesis and growth are 
made up, in greater or less degree, by the rest, and historical 
results are reached having a greatly increased fulness and 
certainty. The establishment of a grand family of related 
languages, like the Indo-European, makes each member con- 


vI.1 IN LINGUISTIC SCIENCE. 241 


tribute, either immediately or mediately, to the elucidation of 
every other. 

The great prominence in the new science of language of 
this comparative method gave that science its familiar title 
of “ comparative philology,” a title which is not yet lost in 
popular usage, although now fully outgrown and antiquated. 
It designated very suitably the early growing phase of lin- 
guistic study, that of the gathering and sifting of material, the 
elaboration of methods, the establishment of rules, the deduc- 
tion of first general results; it still properly designates 
the process by which the study is extended and perfected ; 
but to call the whole science any longer “ comparative philo- 
logy” is not less inappropriate than to call the science of 
zoology “comparative anatomy,” or botanical science the 
“comparison of plants.” 

But the comparative method, as we must not fail to no- 
tice, is no security against loose and false etymologizing ; it 
is not less lable to abuse than any other good thing. If it 
is to be made fruitful of results for the advancement of 
science, it must not be wielded arbitrarily and wildly ; it 
must have its fixed rules of application. Some appear to 
imagine that, in order to earn the title of “ comparative 
philologist,” they have but to take some given language and 
run with it into all the ends of the earth, collating its ma- 
terial and forms with those of any other tongue they may 
please to select. But that which makes the value of com- 
parison — namely, genetical relationship — also determines 
the way in which it shall be rendered valuable. We com- 
pare in order to bring to light resemblances which have their 
ground and explanation ina real historical identity of origin. 
We must proceed, then, as in any other genealogical in- 
quiry, by tracing the different lines of descent backward 
from step to step toward their points of convergence. The 
work of comparison is begun between the tongues+ most 
nearly related, and is gradually extended to those whose 
connection is more and more remote. We first set up, for 
example, a group like the Germanic, and by the study of its 
internal relations learn to comprehend its latest history, dia- 

16 


243 MISAPPLICATIONS OF [1.ECT, 


tinguishing and setting apart all that is the result of inde- 
pendent growth and change among its dialects, recognizing 
what in it is original, and therefore fair subject of compari- 
son with the results of a like process performed upon the 
other branches of the same family. It needs not, indeed, 
that the restoration of primitive Germanic speech should be 
made complete before any farther step is taken ; there are 
correspondences so conspicuous and palpable running through 
all the varieties of Indo-European speech, that, the unity of 
the family having been once established, they are at a glance 
seen and accepted at their true value. But only a small 
part of the analogies of two more distantly related languages 
are of this character, and their recognition will be made 
both complete and trustworthy in proportion as the nearer 
congeners of each language are first subjected to compari- 
son. If English were the only existing Germanic tongue, 
we could still compare it with Attic Greek, and point out a 
host of coincidences which would prove their common origin ; 
but, as things are, to conduct our investigation in this way, 
leaving out of sight the related dialects on each side, would 
be most unsound and unphilological; it would render us 
liable to waste no small share of our effort upon those parts 
of English which are peculiar, of latest growth, and can have 
no genetic connection whatever with aught in the Greek: it 
would expose us, on the one hand, to make false identifica- 
tions (as between our whole and the Greek holos, ‘ entire’) ; 
and, on the other hand, to find diversity where the help of 
older dialectic forms on both sides would show striking re- 
semblance. What analogy, for instance, do we discern 
between our bear, in they bear, and Greek pherousi ? but 
comparison of the other Germanic dialects allows us to trace 
bear directly back to a Germanic form berand, and Dorie 
Greek gives us pheronti, from which comes pherousi by one of 
the regular euphonic rules of the language ; the law of per- 
mutation of mutes in the Germanic languages (see above, p. 
97) exhibits b as the regular correspondent in Low Ger- 
man dialects to the original aspirate ph; and the historical 
identity of the two words compared, in root and termination, 
is thus put beyond the reach of cavil. 


VI | THE COMPARATIVE METHOD. 243 


Yet more contrary to sound method would it be, for ex- 
ample, to compare directly English, Portuguese, Persian, 
and Bengali, four of the latest and most altered representa- 
tives of the four great branches of Indo-European speech to 
which they severally belong. Nothing, or almost nothing, 
that is peculiar to the Bengali as compared with the Sanskrit, 
to the Persian as compared with the ancient Avestan and 
Achemenidan dialects, to the Portuguese as compared with 
the Latin, can be historically connected with what belongs 
to English or any other Germanic tongue. Their ties of 
mutual relationship run backward through those older repre- 
sentatives of the branches, and are to be sought and traced 
there. 

But worst of all is the drawing out of alleged correspond. 
ences, and the fabrication of etymologies, between such lan- 
guages as the English— or, indeed, any Indo-European 
dialect—on the one hand, and the Hebrew, or the Finnish, 
or the Chinese, on the other. Each of these last is the fully 
recognized member of a well-established family of languages, 
distinct from the Indo-European. If there be genetic rela- 
tion between either of them and an Indo-European language, 
it must lie back of the whole grammatical development of 
their respective families, and can only be brought to light by 
the reduction of each, though means of the most penetrating 
and exhaustive study of the dialects confessedly akin with it, 
to its primitive form, as cleared of all the growth and change 
wrought upon it by ages of separation. There may be scores, 
or hundreds, of apparent resemblances between them, but 
these are worthless as signs of relationship until an investi- 
gation not less profound than we have indicated shall show 
that they are not merely superficial and delusive. 

- Let it not be supposed that we are reasoning in a vicious 
circle, in thus requiring that two languages shall have been 
proved related before the correspondences which are to show 
their relationship shall be accepted as real. We are only set- 
ting forth the essentially cumulative nature of the evidences 
of linguistic connection, The first processes of comparison 
by which it is sought to establish the position and relations 
of a new language are tentative merely. No sound linguist 


244 MODERN ETYMOLOGY. [ LECT, 


is unmindful of the two opposing possibilities which interfere 
with the certainty of his conclusions: first, that seeming 
coincidences may turn out accidental and illusory only ; 
second, that beneath apparent discordance may be hidden 
genetic identity.. With every new analogy which his re- 
searches bring to view, his confidence in the genuineness 
and historic value of those already found is increased. And 
when, examining each separate fact in all the light that he 
can cast upon it, from sources near and distant, he bas at 
length fully satisfied himself that two tongues are funda- 
mentally related, their whole mutual aspect is thereby modi- 
fied; he becomes expectant of signs of relationship every- 
where, and looks for them in phenomena which would not 
otherwise attract his attention for a moment. When, on 
the contrary, an orderly and thorough examination, proceed- 
ing from the nearer to the remoter degrees of connection, 
has demonstrated the position of two languages in two 
diverse families, the weight of historic probability is shifted 
to the other scale, and makes directly against the interpret- 
ation of their surface resemblances as the effect of anything 
but accident or borrowing. 

The new etymological science differs from the old, not in 
the character of the results which it is willing to admit, but 
in the character of the evidence on which it is willing to admit 
them. It will even derive Jueus, ‘grove,’ from non lucendo, 
‘its not shining there,’ if only historical proof of the 
derivation be furnished. It finds no difficulty in recognizing 
as identical two words like the French évéque aud the Eng- 
lish bishop, which have not a single sound or letter in com- 
mon; for each is readily traceable back to the Greek 
episkopos.* But it does not draw thence the conclusion 
that, in this or in any other pair of languages, two words 
meaning the same thing may, whatever their seeming dis- 
cordance, be assumed to be one, or are likely to be proved 


* Evique, earlier evesque. evesc, represents the syllables episk, while bishop, 
earlier biskop, represents the syllables piskop. Fach has saved, and still ac- 
cents, the accented syllable of the orig nal; but the French, whose words are 
prevailingly accented on their final syllables, has dropped off all that followed 
it; while the Germanic tongue, accenting more usually the penult in w:rds 
of this structure, has retained the succeeding syllable. . 


VI. | MODERN ETYMOLOGY. ; 245 


one: it waits for the demonstration in each separate case. 
The claim made in our third lecture, that, in the history of 
linguistic changes, any given sound may pass over into any 
other, any given meaning become modified to its opposite, or 
to something apparently totally unconnected with it, may 
seem to take away from etymology all reliable basis; but it 
is not so; for the same researches which establish this claim 
show also the difference between those facile changes which 
may be looked for everywhere, and the exceptional ones 
which only direct and convincing evidence can force us to 
accept as actual in any language; they teach us to study the 
laws of transition of each separate language as part of its 
idiosyncrasy, and to refrain from applying remote and 
doubtful analogies in the settlement of difficult questions. 
In short, the modern science of language imposes upon all 
who pursue it thoroughness and caution. It requires that 
every case be examined in all its bearings. It refuses to ac- 
cept results not founded on an exhaustive treatment of all 
the attainable evidence. It furnishes no instruments of 
research which may not be turned to false uses, and made to 
yield false results, in careless and unskilful hands. It sup- 
plies nothing which can take the place of sound learning 
and critical judgment. Even those who are most familiar 
with its methods may make lamentable failures when they 
come to apply them to a language of which they have only 
superficial knowledge,* or which they compare directly with 
some distant tongue, regardless of its relations in its own 
family, and of its history as determined by comparison with 
these. A scholar profoundly versed in the comparative 
philology of some special group of languages, and whom we 
gladly suffer to instruct us as to their development, may 
have nothing to say that is worth our listening to, when he 
would fain trace their remoter connections with groups of 
which he knows little or nothing. Notwithstanding the 


* Thus, as a striking example and warning, hardly a more utter caricature 
of the comparative method is to be met with than that given by Bopp, the 
great founder and author of the method, himself, in the papers in which he 
attempts to prove the Malay-Polynesian and the Caucasian languages entitled 
to a place in the Indo-European family, * 


246 MISAPPREHENSION OF THE METHODS [LEOT. 


immense progress which the study of language has made 
during the past few years, the world is still full of hasty 
generalizers, who would rather skim wide and difficult con- 
clusions off the surface of half-examined facts than wait to 
gather them as the fruits of slow and laborious research. 
The greater part of the rubbish which is even now heaping 
up in the path of our science, encumbering its progress, 
comes from the neglect of these simple principles: that 
no man is qualified to compare fruitfully two languages or 
groups who is not deeply grounded in the knowledge of both, 
and that no language can be fruitfully compared with others 
which stand, or are presumed to stand, in a more distant re- 
lationship with it, until it has been first compared with its 
own next of kin. 

We see, it may be farther remarked, upon how narrow 
and imperfect a basis those comparative philologists build who 
are content with a facile setting side by side of words ; 
whose materials are simple vocabularies, longer or shorter, of 
terms representing common ideas. There was a period in 
the history of linguistic science when this was the true 
method of investigation, and it still continues to be useful in 
certain departments of the field of research. It is the first 
experimental process; it determines the nearest and most 
obvious groupings, and prepares the way for more penetrat- 
ing study. Travellers, explorers, in regions exhibiting great 
diversity of idiom and destitute of literary records—like our 
western wilds, or the vast plains of inner Africa—do essen- 
tial service by gathering and supplying such material, any- 
thing better being rendered inaccessible by lack of leisure, 
opportunity, or practice. But it must be regarded as pro- 
visional and introductory, acceptable only because the best 
that is to be had. Genetic correspondences in limited lists 
of words, however skilfully selected, are apt to be conspicu- 
ous only when the tongues they represent are of near 
kindred ; and even then they may be in no small measure 
obscured or counterbalanced by discordances, so that deeper 
and closer study is needed, in order to bring out satisfac- 
torily to view the fact and degree of relationship. Penetra- 
tion of the secrets of linguistic structure and grewth, dis. 


v1] AND OBJECTS OF ETYMOLOGY. 247 


covery of correspondences which le out of the reach of 
eareless and uninstructed eyes, rejection of, deceptive re- 
setablances which have no historical foundation—these are 
the most important part of the linguistic student’s work. 
Surface collation without genetic analysis, as far-reaching as 
the attainable evidence allows, is but a travesty of the 
methods of comparative philology. 

Another not infrequent misapprehension of etymologic 
study consists in limiting its sphere of action to a tracing 
out of the correspondences of words. This is, indeed, as we 
have called it, the fundamental stage, on the solidity of 
which depends the security of all the rest of the structure ; 
but it is only that. Comparative etymology, like chemistry, 
runs into an infinity of detail, in which the mind of the stu- 
dent is sometimes entangled, and his effort engrossed ; it 
has its special rules and methods, which admit within certain 
limits of being mechanically applied, by one ignorant or 
heedless of their true ground and meaning. Many a man 
is a skilful and successful hunter of verbal connections whose 
views of linguistic science are of the crudest and most im- 
perfect character. Not only does he thus miss what ought 
to be his highest reward, the recognition of those wide 
relations and great truths to which his study of words should 
conduct him, but his whole work lacks its proper basis, and 
is liable to prove weak at any point. The history of words 
is inextricably bound up with that of human thought and 
life and action, and cannot be read without it. We fully 
understand no word till we comprehend the motives and 
conditions that called it forth and determined its form. The 
word money, for example, is not explained when we have 
marshalled the whole array of its correspondents in all Eu- 
ropean tongues, and traced them up to their source in the 
Latin moneta: all the historical circumstances which have 
caused a term once limited to an obscure city to be current 
now in the mouths of such immense communities ; the wants 
aud devices of civilization and commerce which have created 
the thing designated by the word and made it what it 1s; 
the outward circumstances and mental associations which, by 
successive changes, have worked out the name from a rcot 


248 LINGUISTIC COMPARISON UNIVERSAAN. 


signifying ‘to think ;’ the structure of organ, and the habits 
of utterance—in themselves and in their origin—which have 
metamorphosed monéta into méney:—all this, and more, 
is necessary to the linguistic scholar’s perfect mastery of 
this single term. There is no limit to the extent to which 
the roots of being of almost every word ramify thus through 
the whole structure of the tongue to which it belongs, or 
even of many tongues, and through the history of the people 
who speak them: if we are left in most cases to come far 
short of the full knowledge which we crave, we at least 
should not fail to crave it, and to grasp after all of it that 
lies within our reach. 

We have been regarding linguistic comparison as what it 
primarily and essentially is, the effective means of determin- 
ing genetical relationship, and investigating the historical de- 
velopment of languages. But we must guard against leaving 
the impression that languages can be compared for no other 
purposes than these. In those wide generalizations wherein 
we regard speech as a human faculty, and its phenomena as 
illustrating the nature of mind, the processes of thought, 
the progress of culture, it is often not less important to put 
side by side that which in spoken language is analogous in 
office but discordant in origin than that which is accordant 
in both. The variety of human expression is well-nigh in- 
finite, and no part of it ought to escape the notice of the 
linguistic student. The comparative method, if only it be 
begun and carried on aright—if the different objects of the 
genetic and the analogic comparison be kept steadily in 
view, and their results not confounded with one another— 
need not be restricted in its application, until, starting from 
any centre, it shall have comprehended the whole cirele of 
human speech, 


249 


LECTURE VII. 


Seginnings of Indo-European language. Actuality of linguistic analysis. 
Roots, pronominal and verbal ; their character as the historical 
germs of our language ; development of inflective speech from them. 
Production of declensional, conjugational, and derivative apparatus, 
and of the parts of speech. Relation of synthetic and analytic 
forms. General character and course of inflective development. 


TE last two lectures have given us a view of the Indo- 
Huropean family of languages. We have glanced at the 
principal dialects, ancient and modern, of which it is com- 
posed, noticing their exceeding variety and the high an- 
tiquity of some among them—the unequalled sweep, of time 
and of historic development together, which they include 
and cover. The family has been shown to be of preéminent 
importance and interest to the linguistic student, because 
the peoples to whom it belongs have taken during the past 
two thousand years or more a leading or even the foremost 
part in the world’s history, because it includes the noblest 
and most perfect instruments of human thought and expres- 
sion, and because upon its study is mainly founded the 
present ,science of language. We examined, in a general 
way, the method pursued in its investigation—namely, a 
genetic analysis, effected chiefly by the aid of a widely ex- 
tended comparison of the kindred forms of related dialects 
(whence the science gets its familiar name of “ comparative 
philology ’”)—and_ noted briefly some of the misapprehen- 
sions and misapplications to which this was liable. At 
present, before going on to survey the other great fainiltes 


250 HISTORICAL beHGINNINGS _ [LEor 


of language, and to consider the relation in which they 
stand to the Indo-European, we have to pause long enough 
to look at the main facts in the history of growth of the 
latter—of our own form of speech, using the word “ our” 
in the widest sense to which we have as yet extended it. 
This we do, partly on account of the intrinsic interest of 
the subject, and partly because the results thus won will be 
found valuable, and even almost indispensable, in the course 
of our farther inquiries. 

The history of Indo-European language has been more 
carefully read, and is now more thoroughly understood, than 
that of any other of the grand divisions of human speech. 
Not that our knowledge of it is by any means complete, or 
is not marked even by great and numerous deficiencies and 
obscurities: owing in no small part to the obliteration of 
needed evidence, and hence irreparable; but in part also 
to incomplete comparison and analysis of the material yet 
preserved, and therefore still admitting and sure ere long to 
receive amendment. Such deficiencies, however, are more 
concerned with matters of minor detail, and less with facts 
and principles of fundamental consequence, here than else- 
where. Hence the mode of development of language in 
general, even from its first commencement, can in no other 
way be so well exemplified as by tracing its special history 
in this single family. 

Our first inquiry concerns the primitive stage of Indo- 
European language, its historical beginnings. 

The general processes of linguistic growth and change, as 
they have for long ages past been going on in all the dialects 
of our kindred, were set forth and illustrated with some de- 
tail in the early part of our discussions respecting language 
(in the second and third lectures). We there saw that, in 
order to provide new thought and knowledge with its ap- 
propriate signs, and to repair the waste occasioned by the 
loss of words from use and memory, and the constant wear- 
ing out of forms, new combinations were made out of old 
mater-als, words of independent significance reduced to the 
position and value of modifying appendages to other words. 
and meanings variously altered and transferred. These 


VI. | OF INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE. 251 


processes may, for aught we can see, work on during an in- 
definite period in the future, with never-ending evolution 
out of each given form of speech of another slightly differ- 
ing from it; even until every now existing dialect shall have 
divided into numerous descendants, and each of these shall 
have varied so far from its ancestor that they kindred shall 
be scarcely, or not at all, discoverable. Have we, now, any 
good reason to believe that they have not worked on thus 
indefinitely in the past also, with a kaleidoscopic resolution 
of old forms and combination of new, changing the aspect of 
language without altering its character as a structure? Or, 
are we able to find distinct traces of a condition of speech 
which may be called primitive in comparison with that in 
which it at present exists P 

This question admits an affirmative answer. The present 
structure of language has its beginnings, from which we are 
not yet so far removed that they may not be clearly seen. 
Our historical analysis does not end at last in mere obscur- 
ity ; it brings us to the recognition of elements which we 
must regard as, if not the actual first utterances of men, 
at least the germs out of which their later speech has been 
developed. It sets before our view a stage of expression 
essentially different from any of those we now behold among 
the branches of our family, and serving as their common 
foundation. 

It must be premised that this belief rests entirely upon 
our faith in the actuality of our analytical processes, as 
being merely a retracing of the steps of a previous synthesis 
—in the universal truth of the doctrine that the elements 
into which we separate words are those by the putting 
together of which those words were at first made up. The 
grounds upon which such a faith reposes were pretty dis- 
tinctly set forth in the second lecture (p. 66), but the im- 
portance of the subject will justify us in a recapitulation of 
the argument there presented. 

No one can possibly suppose that we should ever have 
come to call our morning meal breakfast, if there had not 
already existed in our language the two independent words 
break and fast; any more than that we should say telegraph« 


252 ACTUALITY OF THE PROCESSES [LECT 


wire, hickory-pole, campaign-document, gun-boat, without 
previous possession of the simple words of which are formed 
these modern compounds. earful and fearless, in like 
manner, imply the existence beforehand of the noun fear, 
and of the adjectives full and loose, or their older equivalents, 
which have asspmed, with reference to that noun, the quality 
of suffixes. Nor should we have any adverbial suffix ly, if 
we had not earlier had the adjective like, nor any preterits 
in d (as I love-d), but for the fact that our Germanic ances- 
tors owned an imperfect corresponding to our dd, which 
they added to their new verbs to express past action, Any 
one, I think, will allow that elements distinguishable by 
word-analysis which can thus be identified with independent 
words are thereby proved to have been themselves once in 
possession of an independent status in the language, and to 
have been actually reduced by combination to the form and 
office with which our analysis finds them endowed. But 
farther, few or none will be found to question that all those 
formative elements which belong to the Germanic languages 
alone, of which no traces are to be discovered in any other 
of the branches of the Indo-European family, which consti- 
tute the peculiar patrimony of some or all of the dialects of 
our branch, must have been gained by the latter since their 
separation from the common stock, and in the same way 
with the rest, even though we can no longer demonstrate 
the origin of each affix. With the disguising and effacing 
effects of the processes of linguistic change fully present to 
our apprehensions, we shall not venture to conclude that 
those cases in which our historical researches fail to give 
us the genesis of both the elements of a compound form are 
fundamentally different from those in which it fully succeeds 
in doing so. The difference lies, not in the cases them- 
selves, but in our attitude toward them; in our accidental 
possession of information as to the history of the one, and 
our lack of it as to that of the other. This reasoning, 
however, obviously applies not to Germanic speech alone ; 
it is equally legitimate and cogent in reference to all Indo- 
European language. We cannot refuse to believe that the 
whole history of this family of languages has been, im ita 


Vii.] OF LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS, 253 


grand essential features, the same; that their structure is 
homogeneous throughout. There is no reason whatever for 
our assuming that the later composite forms are made up, 
and not the earlier; that the later suffixes are elaborated 
out of independent elements, and not the earlier. So far 
back as we can trace the history of language, the forces 
which have been efficient in producing its changes, and the 
general outlines of their modes of operation, have been the 
same; and we are justified in concluding, we are even com- 
pelled to infer, that they have been the same from the out- 
set. There is no way of investigating the first hidden steps 
of any continuous historical process, except by carefully 
studying the later recorded steps, and cautiously applying 
the analogies thence deduced. So the geologist studies the 
forces which are now altering by slow degrees the form 
and aspect of the earth’s crust, wearing down the rocks here, 
depositing beds of sand and pebbles there, pouring out 
floods of lava over certain regions, raising or lowering the 
line of coast along certain seas; and he applies the results 
of his observations with confidence to the explanation of 
phenomena dating from a time to which men’s imaginations, 
even, can hardly reach. The legitimacy of the analogical 
reasoning is not less undeniable in the one case than in the 
other. You may as well try to persuade the student of the 
earth’s structure that the coal-bearing rocks lie in parallel 
layers, of alternating materials, simply because it pleased 
God to make them so when he created the earth; or that 
the impressions of leaves, the stems and trunks of trees, the 
casts of animal remains, shells and bones, which they con- 
tain, the ripple and rain-marks which are seen upon.them, 
are to be regarded as the sports of nature, mere arbitrary 
characteristics of the formation, uninterpretable as signs ot 
its history—as to persuade the student of language that 
the indications of composition and growth which he discovers 
in the very oldest recorded speech, not less than in the 
latest, are only illusory, and that ‘his comprehension of 
linguistic development must therefore be limited to the 
strictly historical period of the life of language. It is no 
prepossession, then, nor @ priori theory, but a true logical 


254 ROOTS THE REAL GERM}, [ LECT, 


necessity, a sound induction from observed facts, which 
brings us to the conclusion that all linguistic elements pos- 
sessing distinct meaning and office, variously combined and 
employed for the uses of expression, are originally independ- 
ent entities, having a separate existence before they entered 
into mutual combination. 

In the light of these considerations let us examine a 
single word in our language, the word wrevocability. It 
comes to us from the Latin, where it had the form «wvrevoca- 
bilitas (genitive -tatis). It is clearly made by the addition 
of ty (tas, tatis) to a previously existing irrevocable (wrevo- 
cabili-s), just as we now form a new abstract noun from any 
given adjective by adding ness: for example, doughfacedness. 
Again, revocable (revocabilis) preceded irrevocable, as dutiful 
preceded wndutiful. Further, if there had been no verb to 
revoke (revocare), there would have been no adjective revo- 
cable, any more than lovable without the verb to love. Yet 
once more: although we in English have the syllable voke 
only in composition with prefixes, as revoke, evoke, invoke, 
provoke, yet in Latin, as the verb vocare, ‘ to eall,’ it is, of 
course, older than any of these its derivatives, as stand is 
older than understand and withstand. Thus far our way is 
perfectly clear. But while, in our language, voke appears as 
a simple syllable, uncombined with suffixes, this is only by 
the comparatively recent effect of the wearing-out processes, 
formerly illustrated (in the third lecture) ; in the more 
original Latin, it is invariably associated with formative ele- 
ments, which compose with it forms like vocare, ‘to call, 
vocat, ‘he calls,” vocabar, ‘I was called;’ or, in substantive 
uses, vocs (vor), ‘a calling, a voice,’ vocwm, ‘ of voices ;” and 
so on. There is nothing, so far as concerns the formative 
elements themselves, to distinguish this last class of cases 
from the others, before analyzed ; each suffix has its distinct 
meaning and office, and is applied in a whole class of analo- 
gous words ; and some of them, at least, are traceable back 
to the independent words out of which they grew. The 
only difference is that here, if we cut off the formative ele- 
ments, we have left, not a word, actually employed as such 
in any ancient language of our family, but a significant 


vit. | OF TINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT. 255 


syllable, expressing the general and indeterminate idea of 
‘calling,’ and found to occur in connected speech only when 
limited and defined by the suffixes which are attached to it. 
This is not, however, a peculiarity which can exempt the 
words so formed from a like treatment, leading to like con- 
clusions, with the rest ; we must still trust in the reality of 
our analysis ; and especially, when we consider such forms 
as the Sanskrit vak-mi, vak-shi, vak-ti, where the mi, shi, and 
#i are recognizame pronouns, making compounds which 
mean clearly ‘ call-I,’ ‘ call-thou,’ ‘ call-he,’ we cannot doubt 
that the element voce (vak) had also once an independent 
status, that it was a word, a part of spoken speech, and that 
the various forms which contain it were really produced by 
the addition of other elements to it, and their fusion together 
into a single word, in the same manner in which we have 
fused truth and full into truthful, truth and loose into truth 
less, true and like into truly. 

The same conclusion may be stated in more general terms, 
as follows. The whole body of suffixes, of formative end- 
ings, is divided into two principal planeuet first, primary, 
or such as form derivatives directly from roots; second, 
secondary, or such as form derivatives from other derivatives, 
from themes containing already a formative element. But 
the difference between these two classes is in their use and 
application, not in their character and origin. No insigni- 
ficant portion of each is traceable back to independent words, 
and the presumption alike for each is that in all its parts it 
was produced in the same manner. If, then, we believe 
that the themes to which the secondary endings are appended 
were historical entities, words employed in actual speech 
before their further composition, we must believe the same 
respecting the roots to which are added the primary end- 
ings: these are not less historical than the others. 

The conclusion is one of no small consequence. Elements 
like voc, each composing a single syllable, and containing no 
traceable sign of a formative element, resisting all our 
attempts at reduction to a simpler form, are what we arrive 
at as the final results of our analysis of the Indo-European 
vocabulary ; every word of wuich this is made up—save those 


256 ORIGINAL MONOSYLLABISM [ LECT. 


whose history is obscure, and cannot be read far back to- 
ward its beginning—is found to contain a monosyllabic root 
as its central significant portion, along with certain other 
accessory portions, syllables or remnants of syllables, whose 
office it is to define and direct the radical idea. The roots 
are never found in practical use in their naked form; they 
are (or, as has been repeatedly explained, have once been) 
always clothed with suffixes, or with suffixes and prefixes; 
yet they are no mere abstractions, dissected ont by the 
grammarian’s knife from the midst of organisms of which 
they were ultimate and integral portions; they are rather 
the nuclei of gradual accretions, parts about which other 
parts gathered to compose orderly and membered wholes; 
germs, we may call them, out of which has developed the in- 
tricate structure of later speech. And the recognition of 
them in this character is an acknowledgment that Indo-Ku- 
_ ropean language, with all its fulness and inflective suppleness, 
is descended from an original monosyllabic tongue ; that our 
ancestors talked with one another in single syllables, indica- 
tive of the ideas of prime importance, but wanting all 
designation of their relations; and that out of these, by 
processes not differing in their nature from those which are 
still in operation in our own tongue, was elaborated the 
marvellous and varied structure of all the Indo-European 
dialects. 

Such is, in fact, the belief which the students of language 
have reached, and now hold with full confidence. New and 
strange but a few years ago, it commands at present the 
assent of nearly all comparative philologists, and is fast be- 
coming a matter of universal opinion. Since, however, it is 
still doubted and opposed by a few even among linguistic 
scholars, aud is doubtless more or less unfamiliar and start- 
ling to a considerable part of any educated community, 
it will be proper that we combine with our examination of it 
some notice and refutation of the arguments by which it is 
assailed. 

It is surely unnecessary, in the first place, to protest against 
any one’s taking umbrage at this theory of a primitive 
monosyllabic stage of Indo-European language out of regard 


Vil. ] OF INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE. “57 


for the honour and dignity of our remote ancestors. The 
inguist is making a historical inquiry into the conditions ef 
that branch of the human family to which we belong, and 
should no more be shocked at finding them talking in single 
syllables than dwelling in caves and huts of branches, or 
clad in leaves and skins. To require, indeed, for man’s 
credit that he should have beer. sent upon the earth with a 
fully developed language miraculously placed in his mouth, 
with lists of nouns, verbs, and adverbs stored away in 
his memory, to be drawn upon at will, is not more reasona- 
ble than to require that the first human beings should have 
been born in fuil suits of clothes, and with neat cottages, 
not destitute of well-stocked larders, ready built over their 
heads. It surely is most of all to the honour of human na- 
ture that man should have been ‘able, on so humble a found- 
ation, to build up this wondrous fabric of speech ; and also, 
as we may already say, that he should have been allowed to 
do so is more in accordance with the general plan of the 
Creator, who has endowed him with high capacities, and 
left him to work tiem out to their natural and intended re- 
sults. 

Nor, again, will any one venture to object that it would 
have been impossible to make so imperfect and rudimentary 
a language answer any tolerable purpose as a means of 
expression and communication—any one, at least, who knows 
aught of the present condition of language among the other 
races of the globe. One tongue, the Chinese—as we shall 
see more particularly farther on (in the ninth lecture)—has 
neyer advanced out of its primitive monosyllabic stage; its. 
words remain even to the present day simple radical svlla- 
bles, closely resembling the Indo-European roots, formless, 
not in themselves parts of speech, but mae such only by 
their combination into sentences, where the connection and 
the evident requirements of the sense show in what signifi 
cation and relation each is used. Yet this scanty and crippled 
language has served all the needs of a highly cultivated and 
literary people for thousands of years. 

After these few words of reply to one or two of the diffi. 


culties which sometimes suggest themselves at first blush to 
17 


258 ROOT PRONOMINAL, AND [LEOT. 


those before whom is brought the view we are defending, we 
will next proceed to examine in more detail the original 
monosyllabism of Indo-European lanyuage, and see of what 
character it was. 

The roots of our family of languages are divided into two 
distinct classes: those ultimately indicative of position 
merely, and those significant of action or quality. The 
former class are called demonstrative or pronominal roots ; 
the latter class are styled predicative or verbal roots. 

The pronominal roots are subjective in their character; 
they have nothing to do with the inherent qualities of objects, 
but mark them simply in their relation to the speaker, and 
primarily their local relation ; they give the distinction be- 
tween the ¢his and the that, the nearer and the remoter 
object of attention, myself here, you there, and the third 
person or thing yonder, present or absent. By their nature, 
they are not severally and permanently attachable to certain 
objects or classes of objects, nor are they limited in their 
application ; each of them may designate any and every 
thing, according to the varying relation sustained by the 
latter to the person or thing with reference to which it is 
contemplated. Only one thing can be called the sun ; only 
certain objects’ are white; but there is nothing which may 
not be J, and you, and 7, alternately, as the point from 
which it is viewed changes, In this universality of their ap- 
plication, as dependent upon relative situation merely, and 
in the consequent capacity of each of them to designate any 
object which has its own specific name besides, and so, in a 
manner, to stand for and represent that other name, lies the 
essential character of the pronouns.* From the pronominal 
roots come most directly the demonstrative pronouns, of 
which the personal are individualized forms, and the interro- 
gatives ; from these are developed secondarily the possessives 
and relatives, and the various other subordinate classes. 
They also generate adverbs of position and of direction. To 
examine in detail the forms they take, and the variations of 


* Their Hiadu title, sarvandman, ‘name for everything, universal desig- 
nation,’ is therefore more directly and fundamentally characteristic than the 
one we give them, pronoun, ‘standing for a name.’ 


VI. ] ROOTS VERBAL. 259 


the fundamental distinction between this and that which they 
are applied to express, would lead us too far. So much as 
this may be pointed ont: those beginning with m are espe- 
cially employed to denote the subject, the ego, ‘me myself ;’ 
those with ¢ and 7 are used more demonstratively, and those 
with & interrogatively. They are few in number, hardly 
counting a dozen all together, including some which are pro- 
bably variants of the same original. They are of the simplest 
phonetic structure, consisting either of a pure vowel, like a 
or 2, or of a vowel combined with a single preceding conso- 
nant, forming an open syllable, which is the easiest that the 
organs of articulation can be called upon to utter : instances 
are ma, na, ta, tu, ka. 

The roots of the other class, those of action or quality, 
are very much more numerous, being reckoned by hundreds ; 
and they are of more complicated structure, illustrating every 
variety of the syllable, from the pure single vowel to the 
vowel -preceded or followed, or both, by one consonant, 
or even by more than one. They are of objective import, 
designating the properties and activities inherent in natural 
objects—and prevailingly those that are of a sensible pheno- 
menal character, such as modes of motion and _ physical 
exertion, of sound, and so forth. Let us notice a few in- 
stances of roots which are shown to have belonged to the 
original language of our family by being still met with in all 
or nearly all of its branches. Such are 7 and ga, denoting 
simple motion ; ak, swift motion; std, standing ; ds and sad, 
sitting ; ki, lying; pad, walking; vas, staying; sak, follow- 
ing ; vart, turning ; sarp, creeping ; pat, flying ; plu, flowing ; 
ad, eating; pa, drinking; an, blowing; vid, seeing; klu, 
hearing ; wak, speaking; dha, putting; dd, giving; labh, 
taking ; garbh, holding ; dik, pointing out; bhar, bearing ; 
kar, making ; tan, stretching ; skid and dal, dividing ; bandh, 
binding ; star, strewing; par, filling; mar, rubbing; bd, 
shining ; bhi, growing, ete., ete. 

In endeavouring to apprehend the significance of these 
roots, we must divest their ideas of the definite forms of 
conception which we are accustomed to attach to them: 
eacl represents its own meaning in nakedness, in an indeter« 


Liz 


260 ROOTS. [ LECT, 


minate condition from which it is equally ready to take on 
the semblance of verb or of noun. We may rudely illustrate 
their quality by comparing them with such a word ia our own 
language as love, which, by the wearing off of the formative 
elements with which it was once clothed, has reverted to the 
condition of a bare root, and which must therefore now be 
placed in such connection, or so pregnantly and significantly 
uttered, as to indicate to the intelligent and sympathizing 
listener in what sense it is meant and is to be understvod 
—whether as verb, in “I love,” or as substantive, in “ my 
love,” or as virtual adjective, in “ love-letter.”’ 

The inquiry, which might naturally enough be raised at 
this point, how the radical syllables of which we are treating 
were themselves originated, and whether there be any 
natural and necessary connection between them, or any of 
them, and the ideas which they represent, such as either 
necessitated or at least recommended the allotment of the 
particular sign to the particular conception, we must pass 
by for the present, having now to do only with that for 
which direct evidence is to be found in language itself, with 
the bistorically traceable beginnings of Indo-European 
speech ; this question, with its various dependent questions 
ofa more theoretical and recondite nature, is reserved for con- 
sideration at a later time (in the eleventh lecture). 

Tt deserves to, be renewedly urged that, in this account 
of the primitive stage of Indo-European language, there is 
nothing which is not the result of strict and careful induc- 
tion from the facts recorded in the dialects of the different 
members of the family. No one’s theory as to what the 
beginnings of language must have been, or might naturally 
have been expected to be, has had anything to do with 
shaping it. It has been a matter of much controversy 
among linguistic theorizers what parts of speech language 
began with ; whether nouns or verbs were the first words ; 
but I am not aware that any acute thinker ever devised, 
upon @ priori grounds, a theory at all closely agreeing with 
the account of the matter at which comparative philology 
soon arrived through her historical researches. That the 
first traceable linguistic entities are not names of concrete 


VII. ROOTS. 261 


objects, but designate actions, motions, phenomenal condi 
tions, is a truth resting on authority that overrides all 
preconceived theories and subjective opinions. How far and 
why it is accordant with what a sound theory, founded on 
our general knowledge of human nature and human speech, 
would teach, and is therefore entitled to be accepted as a 
satisfactory explanation of the way in which men began to 
talk, we shall inquire in the lecture devoted to such subjects. 

Thus is it, also, as regards the division of the roots inte 
two classes, pronominal and verbal: this division is s¢ 
clearly read in the facts of language that its acceptance 
cannot be resisted. Some are loth to admit it, and strive 
to find a higher unity in which it shall disappear, the two 
classes falling together into one; or to show how the pro- 
nominal may be relics of verbal roots, worn down by 
linguistic usage to such brief form and unsubstantial sig- 
nificance; but their efforts must atleast be accounted alto- 
gether unsuccessful hitherto, and it is very questionable 
whether they are called for, or likely ever to meet with 
success. As regards the purposes of our present inquiry, 
the double classification is certainly primitive and absolute ; 
back to the very earliest period of which linguistic analysis 
gives us any knowledge, roots verbal and roots pronominal 
are to be recognized as of wholly independent substance, 
character, and office. 

But, it may very properly be asked, how do we know that 
the roots which we have set up, and the others like them, 
are really ultimate and original? why may they not be the 
results of yet more ancient processes of linguistic change— 
like ove and lie, and so many others, which have been re- 
peatedly cited, and shown to have taken in our language the 
place of earlier complicated forms, such as lagamasi and 
laganti ? how should they be proved different from our word 
count, for example, which we treat like an original root, ex- 
panding it by means of suffixes into various forms——as he 
counts, they counted, counting, counter, countable—while yet 
it is only a modern derivative from a Latin compound verb 
containing a preposition, namely computare, ‘to think to. 
gether, combine in thought,’ got through the medium of the 


262 ARE THE KNOWN ROOTS [LEcr, 


French compter (where the p is still written, though not 
pronounced)—in fact, the same word as the evidently made- 
up compute? Of apparent monosyllabic verbal roots like 
this, which are readily proved by a little historical study to 
be of polysyllabie origin, or to contain the relics of forma 

tive processes, our language contains no small number : 
other instances are preach from pre-dicare, vend from venum- 
dare, blame from Greek blas-phémein ; don and doff from do 
on and do off; learn, of which the n is a passive ending, 
added to lere, ‘teach,’ whence comes lore, ‘doctrine ;’ to 
throng, a denominative from the noun throng, which is 
derived from thring (Anglo-Saxon thringan), ‘ press,’ lost in 
our modern use (as if we were to lose sing, and substitute 
for it to song, from the derived noun song) ; to blast, a like 
denominative from blast, a derivative from blesan, ‘to blow, 
blare ;’ and so on. Such are to be found also abundantly 
in other languages, modern and ancient ; why not as well 
among the alleged Indo-European roots? Now there can 
be no question whatever that such additions to the stock 
of verbal expression have been produced at every period of 
the growth of language, not only throughout its recorded 
career, but also in times beyond the reach of historic analy- 
sis. There is not a known dialect of our family which does 
not exhibit a greater or Jess number of seeming roots pecu- 
liar to itself’; and of these the chief part may be proved, or 
are to be assumed, to be of secondary origin, and not at all 
entitled to lay claim to the character of relics from the ori- 
ginal stock, lost by the sister dialects, Even the Sanskrit, 
upon which we have mainly to rely for our restoration of 
Indo-European roots, possesses not a few which are such 
only in seeming, which are of special Aryan or Indian 
growth, and valueless for the construction of general Indo- 
European etymologies. And, yet farther, among those very 
radical syllables whose presence in the tongues of all the 
branches proves them a possession of the original commu. 
nity before its dispersion, there are some which show the 
clearest signs of secondary formation, As a single example, 
let us take the root man, ‘think’ (in Latin Me-Min-t, MON« 
eo, mens ; Greek men-os, man-tis s Lithuanian men-% ; Meese. 


VII. ] ABSOLUTELY ORIGINAL P 263 


Gothic man, German mein-en, our I mean): distinct scalo- 
gies lead us to see in it a development—probably through a 
derivative noun, of which it is the denominative—of the 
oider root md, meaning either ‘to make’ or ‘to measure ;’ 
a designation for the mental process having been won by 
liguratively regarding it as a mental manufacture or produc- 
tion, or else as an ideal mensuration of the object of thought, 
a passing from point to point of it, in estimation of its 
dimension and quality. Some linguistie scholars go much 
farther than others in their attempts at analyzing the Indo- 
European roots, and referring them to more primitive ele- 
ments ; all the methods of secondary origin which we have 
illustrated above have been sought for and thought to be 
recognized among them; and there are those who are un- 
willing to believe that any absolutely original root can have 
ended otherwise than in a vowel, or begun with more than 
a single consonant, and who therefore regard all radical 
syllables not conforming with their norm as the product of 
composition or fusion with formative elements. We need 
not here enter into the question as to the justice of these 
extreme views, or a criticism of the work of the root- 
analysts ; we are compelled at any rate to concede that the 
results of growth are to be seen among even the earliest 
traceable historical roots ; that we must-be cautious how we 
claim ultimateness for any given radical syllable, unless we 
can succeed in establishing an ultimate and necessary tie 
between it and the idea it represents; and that the search 
after the absolutely original in human speech is a task of 
the most obscure and recondite character. 

But these concessions do not impair our claim that the 
inflective structure of Indo-European speech is built up 
upon a historical foundation of monosyllabic roots. If the 
particular roots to which our analysis brings us are not in 
all cases the products of our ancestors’ first attempts at 
articulation, they are at any rate of the same kind with 
these, and represent to us the incipient stage of speech. If 
in every dissyllable whose history we can trace we recognize 
® compound structure, if in every nominal and verbal form 
we find a formative element which gives it character as 


264 ROOTS THE GERMS [ LeoT, 


noun or verb, then we must believe that the germs out of 
which our language grew were not more complicated than 
single syllables, and that they possessed no distinct charac- 
ter as nouns or verbs, but were equally convertible into both. 
Our researches are only pointed a step farther back, without 
a change of method or result. That in these roots we 
approach very near to, if we do not quite touch, the actual 
beginnings of speech, is proved by other considerations. In 
order to bring into any language new apparent roots, and 
give them mobility by clothing them with inflections, a 
system of inflections must have been already elaborated by 
use with other roots in other forms. We cannot apply our 
das sign of the imperfect tense to form such words as I 
electrified, I telegraphed, until we have worked down our 
preterit did,in substance and meaning, to such a mere form- 
ative element. And when we have traced the suffix back 
until we find it identical with the independent word out of 
which it grew, we know that we are close upon the begin- 
ning of its use, and have before us virtually that condition 
of the language in which its combinations were first made. 
So also with the adverbial suffix Jy, when we have followed 
it up to lice, a case of the adjective lic, ‘like.’ Now, in 
connection with the roots of which examples have been given 
above, we see in actual process of elaboration the general 
system of Indo-European inflection, the most ancient, 
fundamental, and indispensable part of our grammatical 
apparatus ; and we infer that these roots and their like are 
the foundation of our speech, the primitive material out of 
which its high and complicated fabric has been reared. It 
is not possible to regard them as the worn-down relics of a 
previous career of inflective development. The English, it 
is true, has been long tending, through the excessive preva- 
lence of the wearing-out processes, toward a state of flee- 
tionless monosyllabism ; but such a monosyllabism, where the 
grammatical categories are fully distinguished, where rela- 
tional words and connectives abound, where every vocable 
inherits the character which the former pogsession of inflec- 
tion has given it, where groups of related terms are applied 
to related uses, is a very different thing from a primitive 


viz] OF INFLECTIONAL GROWTH. 265 


monosyllabism like that to which the linguistic analyst is 
conducted by his researches among the earliest representa- 
tives of Indo-European language; and he finds no more 
dificulty im distinguishing the one from the other, and 
recognizing the truescharacter of each, than does the geolo- 
gist in distinguishing a primitive crystalline formation from 
a conglomerate, composed of well-worn pebbles, of diverse 
origin and composition, and containing fragments of earlier 
and later fossils. If the English were strictly reduced to 
its words of one syllable, it would still contain an abundant 
repertory of developed parts of speech, expressing every 
variety of idea, and illustrating a rich phonetic system. 
The Indo-European roots are not parts of speech, but of 
indeterminate character, ready to be shaped into nouns and 
verbs by the aid of affixes ; they are limited in signification 
to a single class of ideas, the physical or sensual, the phe- 
nomenal, out of which the intellectual and moral develop 
themselves by still traceable processes; and in them is 
represented a system of articulated sounds of great sim- 
plicity. It will be not uninstructive to set down here, for 
comparison with the spoken alphabet of our modern Eng- 
lish, already given (see p. 91), that scanty scheme of articu- 
lations, contaming but three vowels and twelve consonants, 
which alone is discoverable in the earliest Indo-European 
language ; it is as follows: 


‘ ¥: “ Vowels. 
ir Semivowel. 
n % Nasals. 
A® Aspiration. 
& Sibdilant. — 
A : , Mutes. 


© The aspiration is not found as a separate letter, but only in close com- 
bination with the mutes, forming the aspirated mutes gA, dA, 54, and (probably 
by later developmen ) £4, 4, ph. These aspirates, though historically they 
aze independent and important members of the system of spoken sounds, I 
have not given separately im the scheme, because phonetically they are com- 
— containing U € aspiration as a distinctly audible element fallowing 
mule. 


266 DEVELOPMENT OF SPEECH. [ LECT. 


These are the sounds which are distinguished from one 
another by the most marked differences, which our organs 
most readily utter, and which are most universally found in 
human speech: all others are of later origin, having grown 
out of these in the course of the phonetic changes which 
words necessarily undergo, as they pass from one genera- 
tion’s keeping to another’s. Our race has learned, as we 
may truly express it, by long ages of practice, of both mouth 
and ear, what the child now learns, by imitation and in- 
struction, in a few months or years: namely, to add to its 
first easy utterances others more nicely differentiated, and 
produced by a greater effort of the organs. In like man- 
ner, starting from the mere rudiments of expression in 
radical monosyllables, the tribes of our family have acquired, 
through centuries and thousands of years of effort, the dis- 
tinction and designation of innumerable shades of meaning, 
the recognition and representation of a rich variety of 
relations, in the later wealth of their inflective tongues— 
resources which, being once won, the child learns to wield 
dextcrously even before he is full grown. It will be our 
next task to review the steps by which our language ad- 
vanced out of its primitive monosyllabic stage, by which it 
acquired the character of inflective speech. To follow out 
the whole process in detail would be to construct in full 
the comparative grammar and history of the Indo-European 
dialects—a task vastly too great for us to grapple with here ; 
we can only direct our attention to some of the principal 
and characteristic features of the development. 

The first beginning of polysyllabism seems to have been 
made by compounding together roots of the two classes 
already described, pronominal and verbal. Thus were pro- 
duced true forms, in which the indeterminate radical idea 
received a definite significance and application. The addi- 
tion, for example, to the verbal root vak, ‘ speaking,’ of 
pronominal elements mi, si, t¢ (these are the earliest histori- 
cally traceable forms of the endings: they were probably 
yet earlier ma, sa, ta), in which ideas of the nearer and 
remoter relation, of the first, second, and third persons, were 
already distinguished, produced combinations vakmi, vakst, 


VII. ] GROWTH OF VERBAL FORMS. 267 


vakit, to which usage assigned the meaning ‘I here speak,’ 
‘thou there speakest,’ ‘he yonder speaks,’ laying in them 
the idea of predication or assertion, the essential character- 
istic which makes a verb instead of a noun, just as we put 
the same into the ambiguous element love, when we say I 
love. Other pronominal elements, mainly of compound 
form, indicating plurality of subject, made in like manner 
the three persons of the plural: they were masi (ma-si, ‘ I- 
thou,’ i.e. ‘we’), tasi (¢a-si, ‘he-thou,’ ie. ‘ye’), and anti 
(of more doubtful genesis). A dual number of the same 
three persons was likewise added; but the earliest form and 
derivation of its endings cannot be satisfactorily made out. 
Thus was produced the first verbal tense, the simplest and 
most immediate of all derivative forms from roots. The 
various shapes which its endings have assumed in the later 
languages of the family have already more than once been 
referred to, in the way of illustration of the processes of 
linguistic growth: our th or 8, in he goeth or goes, still dis- 
tinctly represents the ¢i of the third person singular ; and 
in am we have a solitary relic of the mi of the first. Doubt. 
less the tense was employed at the outset as general pre- 
dicative form, being neither past, present, nor future, but 
all of them combined, and doing duty as either, according 
as circumstances required, and as sense and connection 
explained ; destitute, in short, of any temporal or modal 
character; but other verbal forms by degrees grew out of 
it, or allied themselves with it, assuming the designation of 
other modifications of predicative meaning, and leaving to 
it the office of an indicative present. The prefixion of a 
pronominal adverb, a or d, the so-called « augment,” point- 
ing to a ‘there’ or ‘then’ as one of the conditions of the 
action signified, produced a distinctively past or preterit 
tense. Although only very scanty and somewhat dubious 
traces of such an augment-preterit (aorist or imperfect) are 
found in any languages of the family beside the Aryan and 
the Greek, it is looked upon as an original formation, once 
shared by them all. Again, the repetition of the root, 
either complete, or by “ reduplication,” as we term it, the 
repetition of its initial part, was made to indicate symboli 


268 GROWTH OF [ LECT. 


cally tle completion of the action signified by the root, and 
furnished another past tense, a perfect: for example, from 
the root da, ‘give, Sanskrit dadiw, Greek dedodka, Latin 
dedi; from dhd, ‘put, make, Greek tetheika, Old High- 
German ¢éta, Anglo-Saxon dide, our did. This reduplicated 
perfect, as is well known, is a regular part of the scheme of 
Greek conjugation; in the Latin, not a few of the oldest 
verbs show the same, in full, or in more or less distinct 
traces; the Mceso-Gothie has preserved it in a considerable 
number of verbs (for example, in hathald, ‘ held, from haldan, 
‘hold ;’ saislep, ‘slept,’ from slepan, ‘sleep’); in the other 
Germanic dialects it is nearly confined to the single word 
did, already quoted. Moods were added by degrees: a 
conjunctive, having for its sign a union-vowel, a, interposed 
between root and endings, and bearing perhaps a symbolical 
meaning; and an optative, of which the sign is 2 or za in the 
same position, best explained as a verbal root, meaning 
‘wish, desire. From this optative descends the “ subjunc- 
tive” of all the Germanic dialects. The earliest future 
appears to have been made by compounding with the root 
the already developed optative of the verb ‘ to be,’ as-yd-mzt ; 
for ‘I shall call, then, the language literally said ‘1 may be 
ealling’ (vak-s-yd-mi). Of primitive growth, too, was a re- 
flexive or “ middle” voice, characterized by an extension of 
the personal endings, which is most plausibly explained asa 
repetition of them, once as subject and once as object : thus, 
wak-mai, for vak-ma-mi, ‘ call-I-me,’ i.e. ‘I call myself:’ it 
was also soon employed in a passive sense, ‘I am called ’— 
as reflexives, of various age and form, have repeatedly been 
so employed, or have been converted into distinct passives, 
in the history of Indo-European language.* Other second- 
ary forms of the verb, as intensives, desideratives, causa- 
tives, were created by various modifications of the root, 
or compositions with other roots; yet such verbal deriva- 
tives have played only a subordinate part in the develop- 


* The Latin passive, for instance, is of reflexive origin, as is that of the 
Scandinavian Germanic dialects. Among modern European tongues, the 
Italian is especially noticeable for its familiar use of reflexive phrases in a 
passive sense : thus, s¢ dice, ‘it says itself,’ for ‘it is said,’ 


Vil. J VERBAL FORMS. 269 


ment of the languages of our family, and neea not be dwelt 
upon here. Of more consequence is the frequent formation 
of a special theme for the present tense, to which was then 
added a corresponding imperfect, made by means of the 
augment. This was accomplished in various ways: either 
by vowel-increment (as in Greek leipd, from lip, ‘ leave’), 
by reduplication (as in Greek dadami, from da: the repeti- 
tion of the root doubtless indicated repetition or continuity 
of the action), or by the addition or even insertion of form- 
ative elements (as in Greek deiknumi from dik, ‘ point out,’ 
Sanskrit yunajmi from yuj, ‘join;’ Greek gignésed, Latin 
gnosco, from gna, ‘ know’); these last are, at least in part, 
noun-suffixes, and the forms they make are by origin de- 
nominatives. 

Of this system of primitive verbal forms, produced before 
the separation of the family into branches, almost every 
branch has abandoned some part, while each has also new 
forms of its own to show, originated partly for supplying the 
place of that which was lost, partly in order to fill up the 
scheme to greater richness, and capacity of nicer and more 
varied expression. The Greek verb is, among them all, the 
most copious in its wealth, the most subtle and expressive 
in its distinctions: it has lost hardly anything that was 
original, and has created a host of new forms, some of which 
greatly tax the ingenuity of the comparative philologist who 
would explain their genesis. The Latin follows not very 
far behind, having made up its considerable losses, and sup- 
plied some new uses, by combinations of secondary growth: 
such are its imperfect in bam, its future in bo, and its deri- 
vative perfects in wi and si, in all of which are seen the 
results of composition with the roots of the substantive 
verb. Both these are greatly superior to the Sanskrit, in 
copiousness of forms, and in preciseness of their application. 
The Germanic verb was reduced at one period almost to the 
extreme of poverty, having saved only the ancient present, 
which was used also in the sense of a future, and a preterit. 
the modern representative of the original reduplicated per- 
fect ; each of the two tenses having also its subjunctive 

‘mood: The existing dialects of the branch have supplied a 


270 GROWTH OF NOUNS [LEcn, 


host of new expressions for tense and mood by the extensive 
employment of auxiliaries, which, in their way, afford an ad 
mirable analytic substitute for the old synthetic forms. To 
trace out and describe in full the history of the Indo- 
European verb, in these and in the other branches of the 
family, showing the contractions and expansions which 
it has undergone, down even to such recent additions as the 
future of the Romanic tongues, and our own preterit in d 
(the reason and method of whose creation have been ex- 
plained above, in the third lecture), would be a most inter- 
esting and instructive task ; but it is one which we may not 
venture here to undertake. 

To follow back to its very beginnings the genesis of nouns, 
and of the forms of nouns, is much more difficult than to 
explain the origin of verbal forms. Some nouns—of which 
the Latin vow (voe-s), ‘a calling, a voice,’ and rex (req-s), 
‘one ruling, a king,’ are as familiar examples as any within 
our reach—are produced directly from the roots, by the ad- 
dition of a different system of inflectional endings ; the idea 
of substantiation or impersonation of the action expressed 
by the root being arbitrarily laid in them by usage, as was 
the idea of predication in the forms of the verb. The two 
words we have instanced may be taken as typical examples 
of the two classes of derivatives coming most immediately 
and naturally from the root: the one indicating the action 
itself, the other, either adjectively or substantively, the 
actor; the one being of the nature of an infinitive, or ab- 
stract verbal noun, the other of a participle, or verbal adjec- 
sive, easily convertible into an appellative. Even such 
derivatives, however, as implying a greater modification of 
the radical idea than is exhibited by the simplest verbal 
forms, appear to have been from the first mainly made by 
means of formative elements, suffixes of derivation, compara- 
ble with those which belong to the moods and tenses, and 
the secondary conjugations of the verb. Precisely what 
these suffixes were, in their origin and primitive substance 
and what were the steps of the process by which they lost 
their independence, and acquired their peculiar value as 
modifying elements, it is not in most cases feasible-to tell 


Vil. | AND DECLENSIONAL FORMS. 271 


But they were obviously in great part of pronominal origin, 
and in the acts of linguistic usage which stamped upon 
them their distinctive value there is much which would 
seem! abrupt, arbitrary, or even perhaps inconceivable, to one 
who has not been taught by extensive studies among yarious 
tongues how violent and seemingly far-fetched are the muta- 
tions and transfers to which the material of linguistic strue- 
ture is often submitted—on how remote an analogy, how 
obscure a suggestion, a needed name or form is sometimes 
founded. Verbal roots, as well as pronominal, were cer- 
tainly also pressed early into the same service: composition 
of root with root, of derived form with form, the formation 
of derivative from derivative, went on actively, producing in 
sufficient variety the means of limitation and individualiza- 
tion of the indeterminate radical idea, of its reduction 
to appellative condition, so as to be made capable of desig- 
nating by suitable names the various beings, substances, acts, 
states, and qualities, observed both in the world of matter 
and in that of mind. 

This class of derivatives from roots was provided with 
another, a movable, set of suffixes, which we eall case-end- 
ings, terminations of declension. Where, as in the case of 
our two examples vox and rea, the theme of declension was 
ecincident with the verbal root, the declensional endings 
themselves were sufficient to mark the distinction of noun 
from verb, without the aid of a suffix of derivation. They 
formed a large and complicated system, and were charged 
with the designation of various relations. In the first place, 
they indicated case, or the kind of relation sustained by the 
noun to which they were appended to the principal action of 
the sentence in which it was used, whether as subject, as di- 
rect object, or as indirect object with implication of meanings 
which we express by means of prepositions, such as with, from, 
in, of. Of cases thus distinguished there were seven. Three 
of them distinctly indicated local relations: the ablative (of 
which the earliest traceable form has ¢ or d for its ending : 
thus, Sanskrit agvdt, Old Latin eguod, ‘from a horse’) 
denvted the relation expressed by from; the locative (with 
the ending 7), that expressed by in; the instrumental (with 


a2 GROWTH OF [LEC1, 


the ending @), that expressed by with, or by—the idea of 
adjacency or accompaniment passing naturally into that of 
means, instrument, or cause. Two cases, the dative and 
genitive, designated relations of a less physical character: 
the former (with the ending ai) we should render by for be- 
fore the noun ; the latter (its ending is asya or as) expressed 
general pertinence or possession. Then the accusative (with 
the sign m) assumed the office of indicating the directest 
dependent relation, that which even with us is expressed 
without the aid of a preposition—the objective—as well as 
that most immediate relation of motion which we signify by 
to. The nominative, finally, has also its ending, s, in the 
presence of which is strikingly exhibited the tendency of 
the earliest Indo-European language to make every vocable 
a true form,'to give to every theme, in every relation, a sign 
of its mode of application, a formative element. Besides 
these seven proper cases, the vocative or interjectional case, 
the form of address, also makes a part of the scheme of de- 
clension ; it has no distinctive ending, but is identical with 
the theme or the nominative case, or is only phonetically 
altered from them. | 

The declensional endings which we have instanced are 
those of the singular number. To explain their origin in 
any such way as shows us their precise value as independent 
elements, and the’ nature of the act of transfer by which they 
were made signs of case-relations, is not practicable. Pro- 
nominal elements are distinctly traceable in most of them, 
and may have assumed something of a prepositional force 
before their combination. The genitive affix is very likely 
to have been at the first, like many genitive affixes of later 
date in the history of the Indo-European languages, one 
properly forming a derivative adjective: and it is not im- 
possible that the dative ending was of the same nature. 

There are many existing tongues which have for the 
plurals of their nouns precisely the same case-endings as for 
the singular, only adding them along with a special piural- 
izing suffix, The attempt has been made* to find such a 


* By Professor Schleicher, in his Compendium of Indo-Eurepean Com. 
parative Grammar, 


VII. | DECLENSIONAL FORMS. 273 


plural-suffix also among the plural endings of our earliest 
nouns, but with only faint and doubtful success; if these 
are actually of composite derivation, the marks of their 
composition are hidden almost beyond hope of discovery. 
We must be content to say for the nresent, at least, that 
the suffixes of declension indicate by their differences the 
distinctions of number as well as of case. And, among the 
nouns as well as the verbs of the primitive language, not 
only a plural, but also a dual, was distinguished from the 
singular by its appropriate endings, which are of not less 
problematical derivation, and, in the earliest condition of 
speech that we can trace, much fewer in number, being 
limited to three. 

One other distinction, that of gender, was partially de- 
pendent for its designation upon the case-endings. We 
have already (in the third lecture) had occasion to yefer to 
the universal classification of objects named, by the earliest 
language-makers of our family, according to gender, as mas- 
culine, feminine, or neuter—a classification only partially 
depending upon the actual possession of sexual qualities, and 
exhibiting, in the modern dialects which have retained it, an 
aspect of almost utter and hopeless arbitrariness. Nor, as 
was before remarked, is it possible even in the oldest Indo- 
European tongues to trace and point out otherwise than 
most dimly and imperfectly the analogies, apparent or fanci- 
ful, which have determined the grammatical gender of the 
different words and classes of words: such is the difficulty 
and obscurity of the subject that we must avoid here enter- 
ing into any details respecting it. It appears that, in the 
first place, from the masculine, as the fundamental form, 
certain words were distinguished as possessed of feminine 
qualities, and marked by a difference of derivative ending, 
often consisting in a prolongation of the final vowel of the 
ending ; while to all the derivatives formed by certain end- 
ings like qualities were attributed. ’ The distinction was 
doubtless made in the beginning by the endings of derivation 
plone, those of case having no share in it; but it passed 
over to some extent into those of case also, the feminine 


here again showing a tendency to broader and fuller forims. 
18 


27-4 CHANGES OF DECLENSION. [Lecr, 


The separation of neuter from masculine was both later in 
origin and less substantially marked, having little to do with 
suffixes of derivation, and extending through only a small 
part of the declensional endings (it is mainly limited to the 
nominative and accusative). 

This system of Indo-European declension has suffered not 
less change in the history of the various branches of the 
family than has that of conjugational inflection. The dual 
number was long ago given up, as of insignificant practical 
value, by most of the branches: the oldest Aryau dialects 
exhibit it most fully; it also makes some figure in ancient 

Greek ; but even the most antique Germanic tongues have 
a dual only in the personal pronouns of the first and second 
persons ; and the Latin shows but the faintest traces of it 
(in the peculiar nominative and accusative endings of duo, 
‘two,’ and ambo, ‘ both’). As regards, again, the cases, the 
complete scheme only appears in the Indian and Persian ; 
and even there the process of its reduction has begun, by 
the fusion, in one or another number, and in one or another 
class of words, of two cases into one—that is to say, the 
loss of the one as a distinct form, and the transference 
of its functions to another. In the oldest known condition 
of the classic tongues, this process has gone yet farther; in 
Latin, the locative and instrumental are thus fused with the 
dative and ablative; and in Greek, the genitive and abla- 
tive have been also compressed into one. The oldest 
Germanic dialects have nominative, accusative, genitive, and 
dative ; with traces of the instrumental, which the later 
tongues have lost. But the modern development of the 
prepositions, and their rise to importance as independent 
indicators of the relations formerly expressed by the case- 
endings, has brought with it a yet more sweeping abandon- 
ment of the latter. We, in English, have saved a single 
oblique case, the ancient genitive, so restricting its use at 
the same time as tomake a simple “ possessive ” of it—and 
further, among the provouns, an accusative or “ objective ” 
(me, us, etc., and whom); in the Romanie languages, the 
aoun has become wholly stripped of case-inflection. In 
what manner we have rid ourselves of the distinctions of 


e.] PARTS OF SPEECH. 275 


grammatical gender has been shown in a previous lecture 
(the third): we still keep up a linguistic distinction of 
natural gender by the use of our generic pronouns of the 
third person, he, she, and it; the modern Persian has 
abandoned even that, and the consideration of sex no longer 
enters into it in any way, save in the vocabulary, in the use 
of such words as son and daughter, bull and cow. Of the 
other modern tongues of the family, some, like these two, 
have eliminated from their grammatical systems the distinc- 
tions of gender; some, like the French, have reduced the 
three genders to two, by effacing the differences of mascu- 
line and neuter; but the larger part, like the German, still 
faithfully adhere to the inherited distinction of masculine, 
feminine, and neuter, so long ago established. 

The ancient Indo-European language made no difference, 
as regarded declension, between its two classes of nouns, 
nouns substantive and nouns adjective. In their genesis, 
the two are but one; the same suffixes, to no small extent, 
form both; each passes by the most easy and natural transfer 
into the other; whether a given word indicating the posses- 
sion of quality should be used attributively or predicatively, 
or as an appellative, was a question of subordinate conse- 
quence. The pronouns, also, both substantive and adjec- 
tive, were inflected by a declension mainly corresponding, 
although marked by some peculiarities, and tending earlier 
to irregular forms. 

With conjugation and declension, the subject of gram- 
matical structure is, in fact, as good as exhausted: every- 
thing in language is originally either verb or noun. To the 
other parts of speech, then, which have been developed out 
of these, we shall need to give but a brief consideration. 

Adverbs, the most ancient and necessary class of indeclin- 
able words, or particles, are by origin, in the earliest stage 
of language as in the latest, forms of declension, cases of 
substantives, or adjectives, or pronouns. We have seen 
already how our adverbs in Jy were elaborated out of former 
oblique cases (instrumentals) of adjectives in lie (‘like’) ; 
so also the usual adverbial ending ment of the Romanic 


languages is the Latin ablative mente, ‘with mind’ (thus, 
18 * 


276 DEVELOPMENT OF PARTICLES. [LEOT. 


French bonnement, ‘kindly, is bond mente, ‘with kind in« 
tent’); the ds which forms Greek adverbs (for example, 
kakés, ‘ill, from kakds, ‘ bad’) is the original ablative case- 
ending: and we are doubtless to infer that both the general 
classes of adverbs, made by means of apparent adverbial 
suffixes, and the more irregular and obscure single words, of 
kindred meaning and office, which we trace in the earliest 
vocabulary of the family, are of like derivation. Those 
parts of speech which we call prepositions were originally 
such, not in our present understanding of the term, but 
according to its etymological signification ; they were ad- 
verbial prefixes to the verb, serving to point out more 
clearly the direction of the verbal action ; it was only later, 
and by degrees, that they detached themselves from the 
verb, and came to belong to the noun, furthering the dis- 
appearance of its case-endings, and assuming their office. 
The earliest of them, as was to be expected from their 
designation of direction, trace their origin chiefly to pro- 
nominal roots; but in part, also, they come from verbal. 
Conjunctions, connectives of sentences, are almost altogether 
of comparatively late growth; the earliest style was too 
simple to call for their use: we have seen examples already” 
(in the third lecture) of the mode in which they were 
arrived at, by attenuation of the meaning of words possess- 
ing by origin a more full and definite significance. Other 
products of a like attenuation, made generally at a decidedly 
modern date, are the articles: the definite article always 
growing out of a demonstrative pronoun ; the indefinite, 
out of the numeral one. 

The interjections, finally, however expressive and pregnant 
with meaning they may be, are not in a proper sense parts 
of speech ; they do not connect themselves with other words, 
and enter into the construction of sentences; they are 
either the direct outbursts of feeling, like oh! ah! or else, 
like st! sh! mere “ vocal gestures,” immediate intimations 
of will—in both cases alike, substitutes for more elaborate 
and distinct expression. They require, however, to be 
referred to here, not merely for the sake of completeness, 
but also because many words come to be employed only 


vil.] RATE OF DEVELOPMENT. 277 


interjectionally which were once full parts of speech; even a 
whole phrase being, as it were, reduced to a single preg- 
nantly uttered exclamation: examples are alas! that is, O 
me lasso,‘oh weary me!’ zounds ! ‘ lswear by God’s wounds,’ 
dear me! that is, dio mio, ‘my God!’ and many others. 

Such are, compendiously and briefly stated, the steps by 
which Indo-European language was developed out of monosyl- 
labic weakness into the wealth and fertility of inflective speech. 
At what rate they went on, how rapid was the growth after 
its first inception, we know not, and we can hardly hope 
ever to know. The conditions of that primitive period, and 
the degree in which they might have been able to quicken the 
now sluggish processes of word-combination and formation, 
are so much beyond our ken that even our conjectures 
respecting them have—at least as yet—too little value to be 
worth recording. What may have been the numbers of the 
community which laid the foundation of all the Indo-Eu- 
ropean tongues, and what its relation to other then existing 
communities, are also points hitherto involved in the deepest 
obscurity. But we know that, before the separation, 
whether simultaneous or successive, of this community into 
the parts which afterward became founders of the different 
tongues of Europe anid south-western Asia, the principal 
part of the linguistic development had already taken place— 
enough for its traces to remain ineffaceable, even to the 
present day, in the speech of all the modern representatives 
of the family: the inflective character of Indo-European 
language, the main distifictions of its parts of speech, its 
methods of word-formation and inflection, were elaborated 
and definitely established. 

But, though we cannot pretend to fix the length of time 
required for this process of growth, in terms of centuries or 
yf thousands of years, we can at least see clearly that it 
1aust lave gone on in a slow and gradual manner, and 
occupied no brief period. Such is the nature of the forces 
by which all change in language has been shown to be 
effectec, that anything like a linguistic revolution, a rapid 
and sweeping modification of linguistic structure, is wholly 
impossible—-and most especially, a revolution of a construct 


278 RATE OF DEVELOPMENT. [LECT 


ive character, building up a fabric of words and forms 
livery item of the difference by which a given dialect is dis. 
tinguished from its ancestor, or from another dialect having 
the same ancestry, is the work of a gradual change of usage 
made by the members of a community in the speech which 
they were every day employing as their means of mutual 
communication, and which, if too rapidly altered, would not 
answer the purposes of communication. It takes time for 
even that easiest of changes, a phonetic corruption or abbre- 
viation, to win the assent of a community, and become 
established as the law of their speech : it takes decades, and 
even generations, or centuries, for an independent word 
to run through the series of modifications in form and mean- 
ing which are necessary to its conversion into a formative ele- 
ment. That the case was otherwise at the very beginning, 
we have not the least reason for believing. The opinion of 
those who hold that the whole structure of a language was 
produced “at a single stroke” is absolutely opposed to all 
the known facts of linguistic history; it has no inductive 
basis whatever; it rests upon arbitrary assumption, and 
is supported by @ priori reasoning. There must have been 
a period of some duration—and, for aught we know, it may 
have been of very long duration—when the first speakers of 
our language talked together in their scanty dialect of form- 
Jess monosyllables. The first forms, developed words con- 
taining a formal as well as a radical element, cannot have 
come into existence otherwise than by slow degrees, worked 
out by the unconscious exercise of that ingenuity in the 
adaptation of means to ends, of that sense for symmetry, for 
finished, even artistic, production, which have ever been 
gualities especially characterizing our division of the human 
race. Every form thus elaborated led the way to others : it 
helped to determine a tendency, to establish an analogy, 
which facilitated their further production. A protracted 
career of formal development was run during that primitive 
period of Indo-European history which preceded the disper- 
sion of the branches: words and forms were multiplied 
until even a maximum of synthetic complexity, of fullness of 
inflective wealth, had been reached, from which there has 


vir. ] ANALYTICAL TENDENCY. 279 


been in later times, upon the whole, a gradual descent and 
impoverishment. : 
Here we must pause a little, to consider an objection 
urged by some linguistic scholars of rank and reputation 
against the truth of the views we have been defending, as te 
the primitive monosyllabism of Indo-European language, 
and its gradual emergence out of that condition—an objec- 
tion which has more apparent legitimacy and force than any 
of those hitherto noticed. It is this. In ascending the 
current of historical development of the languages of our 
family, say the objectors, instead of approaching a monosyl- 
labie condition, we seem to recede farther and farther from 
it. The older dialects are more polysyllabic than the later : 
where our ancestors used long and complicated forms, we 
are content with brief ones, or we have replaced them with 
phrases composed of independent words. Thus, to recur 
once more to a former example, for an earlier lagamasi we 
say we lie; thus, again, for the Latin fwisset, the French 
says simply fit, while we express its meaning by four dis- 
tinct words, he might have been. Modern languages are full 
of verbal forms of this latter class, which substitute syntac- 
tical for substantial combinations. The relations of case, too, 
formerly signified only by means of declensional endings, 
have lost by degrees this mode of expression, and have come 
to be indicated by prepositions, independent words, This is 
what is well known as the “analytical” tendency in linguis- 
tic growth. Our own English tongue exhibits its effects in 
the highest known degree, having reduced near half the 
vocabulary it possesses to a monosyllabic form, and got rid of 
almost all its inflections, so that it expresses grammatical 
relations chiefly by relational words, auxiliaries and connec- 
tives: but it is only an extreme example of the results of a 
movement generally perceptible in modern speech. If, then, 
during the period when we can watch their growth step by 
step, languages have become less synthetic, words less poly- 
syllabic, must we not suppose that it was always so; that 
human speech began with highly complicated forms, which 
from the very first have been undergoing reduction to sim 


pler and briefer shape P 


280 TENDENCY TO ANALYTICAL [LECT 


This is, as we have confessed, a plausible argument, but it 
is at the same time a thoroughly unsound and superficial 
one. It skims the surface of linguistic phenomena, without 
penetrating to the causes which produce them. It might 
pass muster, and be allowed to determine our opinions, if 
the analytical tendency alone had been active since our 
knowledge of language began; if we had seen old forms 
worn out, but no new forms made; if we had seen words 
put side by side to furnish analytic combinations, but no 
elements fused together into synthetic union. But we 
know by actual experience how both synthetic and analytic 
forms are produced, and what are the influences and cireum- 
stances which favour the production of the one rather than 
of the other. The constructive as well as the destructive - 
forces in language admit of illustration, and have been by 
us illustrated, with modern as well as with ancient ex.mples. 
Both have been active together, during all the ages through 
which we can follow linguistic growth. There have never’ 
been forms which were not undergoing continual modifica- 
tion and mutilation, under the influence of the already 
recognized tendencies to forget the genesis of a word in its 
later application, and then to reduce it to a shape adapted to 
more convenient utterance; there was also never a time 
when reparation was not making for this waste in part 
by the fresh development of true forms out of old materials. 
Nor has the tendency been everywhere and in all respects 
downward, toward poverty of synthetic forms, throughout 
the historic period. If the Greek and Latin system of de- 
clension is scantier than that of the original language of the 
family, their system of conjugation, especially the Greek, is 
decidedly richer, filled up with synthetic forms of secondary 
growth; the modern Romanic tongues have lost something 
of this wealth, but they have also added something to it, 
and their verb, leaving out of view its compound tenses, will 
bear favourable comparison with that which was the common 
inheritance of the branches. Some of the modern dialects 
of India, on the other hand, having once lost, in the ordinary 
course of phonetic corruption, the ancient case-terminations 
of the Sanskrit, have replaced them by a new scheme, not 


vil. | FORMS OF EXPRESSION. 281 


less full and complete than its predecessor. The Russiaa of 
the present day possesses in some respects a capacity of 
synthetic development hardly, if at all, excelled by that of any 
ancient tongue. For example, it takes the two independent 
words bez Boga,‘ without God, and fuses them into a theme 
from which it draws a whole list of derivatives. Thus, first, 
by adding an adjective suffix, it gets the adjective bezbozhniii, 
‘godles3;’ a new suffix appended to this makes a noun, 
bezbozhnik, ‘a godless person, an atheist;’ the noun gives 
birth to a denominative verb, bezbozhnichat, ‘ to be an atheist;’ 
from this verb, again, come a number of derivatives, giving 
to the verbal idea the form of adjective, agent, act, and 
so on: the abstract is bezbozhnichestvo, ‘the condition of 
being an atheist ;’ while, once more, a new verb is made 
from this abstract, namely bezbozhnichestvovat, literally ‘ to be 
in the condition of being a godless person.’ A more intri- 
cate synthetic form than this could not easily be found in 
Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit ; but it is no rare or exceptional 
case in the language from which we have extracted it; 
it rather represents, by a striking instance, the general char- 
acter of Russian word-formation and derivation. 

It is obviously futile, then, to talk of an uninterrupted 
and universal reduction of the resources of synthetic expres- 
sion among the languages of the Indo-European family, or 
to allow ourselves to be forced by an alleged pervading 
tendency toward analytic forms into accepting synthesis, in- 
flective richness, as the ultimate condition of the primitive 
tongue from which they are descended. If certain among 
them have replaced one or another part of their synthetic 
structure by analytic forms, if some—as the Germanie 
family in general, and, above all, the English—have taken on 
a prevailingly analytic character, these are facts which we 
are to seek to explain by a careful study of the circumstances 
and tendencies which have governed their respective develop- 
ment. If, moreover, as has been conceded, the general bent 
has for a long time been toward a diminution of synthesis 
aid a predominance of analytic expressions, another question, 
of wider scope, is presented us for solution; but the form 
in which it offers itself is this: why should the forces which 


282 ANALYTIC AND SYNTHETIC [LECT. 


produce synthetic combinations have reached their height of 
activity during the ante-historic period of growth, and haye 
been gradually gained upon later, at varying rates in differ- 
ent communities, by those of another order? We do not 
in the least feel impelled to doubt the historic reality of the 
earliest combinations, their parallelism, in character and 
origin, with those which we see springing up in modern 
times. That we now say analytically I did love, or deal, or 
lead is no ground for questioning that our ancestors said 
compositely J love-did, deal-did, lead-did, and then worked 
them down into the true synthetic forms I loved, dealt, led. 
The cause which produced the different nature of the two 
equivalent expressions I loved and I did love, composed, as 
they are, of identical elements, was a difference in habit of 
the language at the periods when they were respectively 
generated. Any language can do what it is in the habit of 
doing. We can turn almost any substantive in our vocabue 
lary into a quasi adjective—saying a gold watch, a grass 
slope, a church mouse, and so on—because, through the inter- 
mediate step of loose compounds like goldsmith, grasshopper, 
churchman, we have acquired the habit of looking upon our 
substantives as convertible to adjective uses without altera- 
tion and without ceremony. Neither the Frenchman nor 
the German can do the same thing, simply because his 
speech presents no analogies for such a procedure. We, on 
the other hand, like the French, have lost the power to form 
compounds with anything like the facility possessed by the 
ancient tongue from which ours is descended and by some 
of its modern representatives, as the German; not because 
they would not be intelligible if we formed them, but because, 
under the operation of traceable circumstances in our lin- 
guistic history, we have grown out of the habit of so combin- 
ing our words, and into the habit of merely collocating 
them, with or without connectives. Now we have only to 
apply this principle upon a wider scale, and under other 
conditions of language, in order to find, as I think, a suffi- 
cient answer to the question which is engaging our atten- 
tion. When once, after we know not how long a period of 
expectation and tentative effort, the formation of words by 


VII. | FORMS OF EXPRESSION. 283 


synthesis had begun in the primitive Indo-European Jan- 
guage, and had been found so fruitful of the means of varied 
and distinct expression, it became the habit of the language. 
The more numerous the new forms thus produced, the 
greater was the facility of producing more, because the 
material of speech was present to the minds of its speakers 
as endowed with that capacity of combination and fusion of 
which the results in every part of its structure were so 
apparent. But the edifice after a time became, as it were, 
complete; a sufficient working-apparatus of declensional, 
conjugational, and derivative endings was elaborated to 
answer the purposes of an inflective tongue ; fewer and rarer 
additions were called for, as occasional supplements of the 
scheme, or substitutes for lost forms. Thus began a period 
in which the formative processes were more and more exclu- 
sively an inheritance from the past, less and less of recent 
acquisition ; and as the origin of forms was lost sight of, ob- 
_ §cured by the altering processes of phonetic corruption, it be- 
came more and more difficult to originate new ones, because 
fewer analogies of such forms were present to the apprehen- 
sion of the language-makers, as incentives and guides to 
their action. On the other hand, the expansion of the 
whole vocabulary to wealth of resources, to the possession of 
varied and precise phraseology, furnished a notably increased 
facility of indicating ideas and relations by descriptive 
phrases, by groups of independent words. This mode of 
expression, then, always more or less used along with the 
other, began to gain ground upon it, and, of course, helped 
to deaden the vitality of the latter, and to render it yet 
more incapable of extended action. That tendency to the 
conscious and reflective use of speech which comes in with 
the growth of culture especially, and which has already been 
repeatedly pointed out as one of the main checks upon all 
the processes of linguistic change, cast its influence in the 
same direction ; since the ability to change the meaning and 
application of words, even to the degree of reducing them 
to the expression of formal relations, is a much more funda- 
mental and indefeasible property of speech than the ability 
to combine and fuse them bodily together. Then, when 


284 ANALYTIC AND SYNTHETIC [LECT, 


peculiar circumstances in the history of a language have 
arisen, to cause the rapid and general decay and effacement 
of ancient forms, as in our language and the Romanic, the 
process of formative composition, though never wholly ex- 
tinct, has been found too inactive to repair the losses; they 
have been made up by syntactical collocation, and the 
language has taken on a prevailingly analytic character. 

These considerations and such as these, 1 am persuaded, 
furnish a satisfactory explanation of the preponderating 
tendency to the use of analytic forms exhibited by modern 
languages; as they also account for the greatly varying 
degree in which the tendency exhibits itself. But even 
should: they be found insufficient, this would only throw 
open for a renewed investigation the question respecting the 
ground of the tendency; the general facts in the history of 
earliest development of our languages would still remain 
sure, beyond the reach of eavil, since they are established by 
evidence which cannot be gainsaid, contained in the structure 
of the most ancient forms. We are compelled to believe 
that the formative processes which we see going on, in de- 
creasing abundance, in the historically recorded ages of 
linguistic life, are continuations and repetitions of the same 
constructive acts by which has been built up the whoie 
homogeneous structure of inflective speech. 

_ One more theoretic objection to the doctrine of a primi- 
tive Indo-European monosyllabism we may take the time to 
notice, more on account of the respectability of its source 
than for any cogency which it in itself possesses. M. 
Renan, namely,* asserts that this doctrine is the product of 
a mistaken habit of mind, taught us by the artificial scholas- 
tic methods of philosophizing, and leading us to regard 
simplicity as, in the order of time, anterior to complexity ; 
while, in fact, the human mind does not begin with analysis ; 
its first acts being, on the contrary, complex, obscure, syn- 
thetic, containing all the parts, indistinctly heaped together. 
To this claim respecting the character of the mental act we 
may safely yield a hearty assent; but, instead of inferring 


* In his work on the Origin of Language, seventh chapter. 


Vi. | _ FORMS OF EXPRESSION. - 285 


from it that “the idea expressed itself at the beginning with 
its whole array of determinatives and in a perfect unity,” 
and that hence, “in the history of languages, synthesis is 
primitive, and analysis, far from being the natural form of 
the human mind, is only the slow result of its development,” 
we shall be conducted to a precisely contrary conclusion. 
The synthetic forms which we are asked to regard as original 
have not the character of something indistinctly heaped 
together; they contain the clear and express designation of 
the radical idea and of its important relations ; they repre- 
sent by a linguistic synthesis the results of a mental analysis. 
The idea is, indeed, conceived in unity, involving all its as- 
pects and relations ; but these cannot be separately expressed 
until the mind has separated them, until practice in the 
use of language has enabled it to distinguish them, and to 
mark each by an appropriate sign. In amabor, the (Latin) 
word cited as an example of synthesis, are contained precisely 
the same designations as in the equivalent English analytic 
phrase, ‘ I shall be loved:” ama expresses ‘ loving ;’ bo unites 
future-sign and ending designating the first person ; and the 
r is the sign of passivity. Who can possibly maintain that 
a system of such forms, gathered about a root, exhibits the 
results of experience, of developed acuteness, in thought and 
speech, any less clearly than the analytic forms of our Eng- 
lish conjugation? The two are only different methods of 
expressing the same “array of determinatives.” The first 
synthetic mental act, on the contrary, is truly represented 
by the barg root: there all is, indeed, confused and indis- 
crete. The earliest radical words, when first uttered, stood 
for entire sentences, expressed judgments, as undeniably as the 
fully elaborated phrases which we now employ, giving every 
necessary relation its proper designation, It is thus that, 
even at present, children begin to talk; a radical word or 
two means in their mouths a whole sentence: wp signifies 
‘take ane up into your lap;’ go walk, ‘I want to go out te 
walk,’ or ‘I went to walk,’ or various other things, which 
the circumstances sufficiently explain ; but forms, inflections, 
connectives, signs of tense and mode and condition, they do 
not learn to use until later, when their minds have acquired 


286 LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT [LEcT, 


power to separate the indistinct cognition into its parts 
M. Renan, in short, has made a very strange confusion of 
analytic style of expression with mental analysis: all expres- 
sion of relations, whether by means that we call synthetic or 
analytic, is the result and evidence of analysis; and his own 
thesis respecting the complexity in obscurity of unpractised 
and uninstructed thought brings us directly to a recognition 
of the radical stage of Indo-European language as the neces- 
sary historical basis of its inflective development. 

This development, it may be remarked in conclusion, has 
been gradual and steadily progressive, being governed in 
both its synthetic and analytic phases by t):e same causes 
which universally regulate linguistic growth, snd which have 
been here repeatedly set forth or referred to : namely, on the 
one hand, the traditional influence of the st res of expres- 
sion already worked out and handed down, ¢ msisting in the 
education given by them to thought, and j1¢ constraining 
force exerted by their analogies; and, ov the other hand, 
the changing character and capacity, the varying circum- 
stances and needs, of the community of spe kers, during the 
different periods of their history. It has experienced no 
grand revolution, no sudden shift of directi m, no pervading 
change of tendency. There is no cleft, as is sometimes 
assumed, parting ancient tongues from mof ern, Justifying the 
recognition of different forces, the ad? .ission of different 
possibilities, in the one and in the othe. Nor are we to 
regard the energies of a community as al sorbed in the work 
of language-making more at one perio thangat another. 
Language-making is always done uncons iovsly and by the 
way, as it were: it is one of the inciden s of social life, an 
accompaniment and result of intellectu: | activity, not an 
end toward which effort is directed, nor a ask in whose per- 
formance is expended force which might have been other- 
wise employed. The doctrine that a race first constructs its 
language, and then, and not till then, is ready to commence 
its historic career, is as purely fanciful as anything in the 
whole great chapter of @ priori theorizings about speech. 
No living language ever ceases to be constructed, or is less 
rapidly built upon in ages of historic activity : only the style 


VII. GRADUAL AND CONTINUOUS. 287 


of the fabric is, even more than the rate, determined by ex- 
ternal circumstances. It is because the very earliest epochs 
of recorded history are still far distant from the beginnings 
of Indo-European language, as of human language gener- 
ally, that we find its peculiar structure completely developed 
when it is first discovered by our researches. We have fully 
acknowledged the powerful influence exerted by culture over 
the growth of language: but neither the accident of position 
and accessibility to other nations that at a certain time brings 
a race forward into the light of record, and makes it begin to 
be an actor or a factor in the historic drama, nor its more 
gradual and independent advance to conspicuousness in 
virtue of acquired civilization and political power, can have 
any direct effect whatever upon its speech. The more 
thorough we are in our study of the living and recent forms 
of human language, the more rigorous in applying the deduc- 
tions thence drawn to the forms current in ante-historie 
periods, the more cautious about admitting forces and effects 
in unknown ages whereof the known afford us no example 
or criterion, so much the more sound and trustworthy will 
be the conclusions at which we shall arrive. It is but a 
shallow philology, as it is a shallow geology, which explains 
past changes by catastrophes and cataclysms. 

We have now long enough given our almost exclusive 
attention to the language of the Indo-European race, and, in 
the next two lectures, shall proceed to define the boundaries 
and sketch the characters, as well as we may, of the other 
grand divisions of human speech. 


268 


LECTURE VIII. 


Fai ilies of languages, how established. Characteristic features of Indo» 
European language. Semitic family : its constitution, historic value, 
literatures, and linguistic character. Relation of Semitic to Indo- 
European language. Scythian or Altaic family: its five branches: 
their history, literatures, and character. Unity of the family some- 
what doubtful. 


We have now taken a survey of the most important 
phenomena of language and of linguistic growth, as they 
are illustrated in the forms of speech peculiar to the Indo- 
European family. We have seen in what scanty beginnings 
our own tongue and those related to it had their origin, and 
what, in brief, were the steps by which they advanced from 
the weakness and barrenness of radical monosyllabism to the 
rich completeness of inflective speech. These matters were 
brought to light in the course of the regular prosecution of 
our fundamental inquiry, “why we speak as we do,” it 
having been made to appear that our English linguistic 
tradition had been, during a protracted and most important 
period, one with that of all the other members of the family 
mentioned. But now, considering the possibility that the 
Indo-European family may be found, after all, only a con- 
stituent group in some yet vaster family—or even, supposing 
that possibility to be disproved, considering the impropriety 
of our so circumscribing our interests and our sympathies 
as to understand by the “we” of our question anything 
less than the whole human race—it becomes our duty next 
to pass in review the other great linguistic families which 


‘VIII. ] ALL LANGUAGES HOMOGENEOUS, 289 


the science of language has established, and to see wherein 
they agree with that which has hitherto absorbed the chief 
share of our attention, and wherein they differ from it. 
Moreover, it is clear that we should not appreciate the 
peculiar character of the mode of communication and ex- 
pression belonging to our family, we should not even know 
that it had a distinctive character of its own, that the pro- 
blem of speech was not solved in an identical manner by all 
parts of the human race, if we did not look to see how the 
other families have ecnstructed the fabric of their language. 
We shall, accordingly, devote the present lecture and the 
one next following tc such an examination ; making it, of 
course, much more brief and cursory than has been our ex- 
amination of Indo-European language. 

There was the more reason why we should draw out with 
some fullness of detail the recognized history of develop- 
ment of the language which has been most deeply studied and 
is most thoroughly understood by linguistic scholars, inas- 
much as some of the main results thereby won have a 
universal value. Much of that which has been demonstrated 
to be true respecting Indo-European speech is to be accepted 
as true respecting all human speech. Not that its historical 
analysis has been everywhere made so complete as to yielc 
in each case with independent certainty the same results 
which the study of this one family has yielded. But nothing 
has been found which is of force to prove the history of 
language otherwise than, in its most fundamental features, 
the same throughout the globe; while much has been elicited 
which favours its homogeneousness : enough, indeed, when 
faken in connection with the theoretical probabilities of 
the case, to make the conclusion a sufficiently certain one, 
that all the varied and complicated forms of speech which 
10w fill the earth have been wrought into their present 
shape by a like process of gradual development; that all 
lesignation of relations is the result of growth ; that forma- 
ive elements have been universally elaborated out of inde- 
vendent words ; that the historical germs of language 
verywhere are of the nature of those simple elements which 


ve have called roots; moreover, that roots have generally, if 
19 


250 CLASSIFICATION OF [ LECT. 


not without exception, been of the two classes described in 
the last lecture, pronominal and verbal; and that, in the 
earliest stages of growth, forms have been produced espe- 
cially by the combination of roots of the two classes, the 
verbal root furnishing the central and substantial idea, the 
prononunal indicating its modifications and relations. 
Linguistic families, now, as at present constituted, are 
made up of those languages which have traceably had at 
least a part of their historical development in common ; 
which have grown together out of the original radica: or 
monosyllabic stage; which exhibit in their grammatica. 
structure signs, still discoverable by linguistic analysis, of 
having descended, by the ordinary course of linguistic tradi- 
tion, from a common ancestor. We shall see hereafter (in 
the tenth lecture), indeed, that the science of language does 
not and cannot deny the possible correspondence of some or 
all of the families in their ultimate elements, a correspond- 
ence anterior to all grammatical development; but neither 
does she at present assert that correspondence. She has 
carried her classification no farther than her collected 
material, and her methods of sober and cautious induction 
from its study, have justified her in doing; she has stopped 
grouping where her facts have failed her, where evidences of 
common descent have become too slight and vague to be 
longer depended upon: and the limit of her power is now, 
and is likely ever to be, determined by coincidences of gram- 
matical structure. The boundaries of every great family, 
again, are likely to be somewhat dubious; there can hardly 
fail to be branches which either parted so early from the 
general stock,.or have, owing to peculiar circumstances in 
their history, varied so rapidly and fundamentally since they 
left it, that the tokens of their origin have become effaced 
almost or quite beyond recognition. There was atime when 
the Celtic languages were thus regarded as of doubtful 
affinity, until a more penetrating study of their material and 
structure brought to light abundant and unequivocal evi-~ 
dence of their Indo-European descent. The Albanian, the 
modern representative of the ancient Illyrian, spoken by the 
fierce and lawless race which inhabits the mountains of 


Vi1i.] LANGUAGES BY FAMILIES. 291 


north-western Greece, ?s still in the same position; linguistic 
scholars are divided in opinion as to whether it is yet proved 
to be Indo-European, though with a growing preponderance 
upon the affirmative side. Examples of excessive and effacing 
cilferentiation are not wanting in existing speech. There 
are now spoken among barbarous peoples in different parts 
of the world—as on some of the islands of the Pacific, 
among the African tribes, and the aborigines of this con- 
tinent—dialects in which the processes of linguistic change, 
the destruction and reconstruction of words and forms, are 
going on at a rate so abnormally rapid, that a dialect, it is 
said, becomes unintelligible in a generation or two; andina 
few centuries all material trace of affinity between idioms of 
common descent may become blotted out. Such exceptional 
cases do not take away the value of the genetic method of 
investigation, nor derogate from the general certainty of its 
results in the classification of languages. But they do cause 
the introduction, cautiously and to a limited extent, of 
another indication of probable relationship: namely, con- 
cordance in the general method of solution of the linguistic 
problem. It is found that the great families of related 
languages differ from one another, not only in the linguistic 
material which they employ, in the combinations of sounds 
out of which, back to the remotest traceable beginning, they 
make their radical and formative elements, and designate 
given meanings and relations, but also, and often to no small 
degree, in their way of managing their material; in their 
apprehension of the relations of ideas which are to be ex- 
pressed by the combination of elements, and in the method 
in which they apply the resources they possess to the 
expression of relations: they difier in the style, as well as 
the substance, of their grammatical structure. 1t is evident 
that the style may be so peculiar and characteristic as to 
constitute valid evidence of family relationship, even where 
the substance has been altered by variation and substitution 
till it presents no trustworthy coincidences. We shall have 
occasion to note and examine, farther on, some of the cases 
in which reliance is placed upon morphological correspond- 


ences, as they are called, upon correspondences of structural 
1a. 


292 CHARACTERISTICS GF [ LECT. 


form; aud also to refer to the morphological classifications 
of human languages which are founded upon them—classifi- 
cations which mainly coincide with genetic, but also more or 
less combine and overlap them. 

The main characteristic features of the structure of Indo- 
European language are readily enough deducible from the 
exposition given in the preceding lecture. It generates its 
forms by the intimate combination of elements originally in- 
dependent; in this respect agreeing with nearly all other 
known tongues. In its combinations, moreover, the forma- 
tive element is almost invariably added after the radical, 
forming a suffix; the only noteworthy exceptions are the 
augment of the primitive preterit tense of the verb, the 
negative prefix (our wn, in, in unthankful, incapable, and the 
like), and the more separable elements which we call prepo- 
sitions (in intend, pretend, extend, distend, and so forth) : and 
here, too, its usage is paralleled by that of the majority of 
spoken languages throughout the world. A more distinctive 
characteristic of Indo-European language is the peculiar 
aptitude which it possesses for closely combining its radical 
and formal elements, for losing sight of their separate indi- 
viduality, and applying their combination as independent 
conventional sign of the object indicated. It disembarrasses 
itself of useless reminiscences of the former sfotus and 
quality of its elements, fuses them completely together, and 
exposes the result, as one whole, to the action of all the 
wearing and altering processes of linguistic life. In different 
constituents of the dialects of our family, in different dia- 
lects, and in different stages of their history, this tendency 
is seen exhibited in very different degree. In our own 
tongue, for instance, in such words as fully, thankfully, wn- 
thankfulness, the combined elements are held distinctly 
apart, and are present in their separate substance and office 
to the mind of any one who reflects a moment upon the 
words; on the other hand, in ken and can, in sit and sect, in 
man and men, in lead and led, in sing, sang, sung, and song, 
in bind, bound, band, and bond, and other like cases, the 
fusion has gone to its utmost extent: various combinations 
of subordinate elements with the roots of these words have 


i i ie 


vut.] INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE. 283 


saused the development of the roots themselves into varying 
phonetic forms ; and these have then been applied, at ‘first 
te support, and afterwards to replace, the primitive means of 
grammatical expression: an internal flection has come in 
upon and supplanted the original aggregation, All Indo-Eu- 
ropean forms are originally of the kind here first illustrated, 
mere agglutinations of independent elements, whereof a 
part are reduced to a subordinate value and formal signifi- 
cance ; but they tend, in a marked degree, to pass over into 
the other kind, indicating formal relations by internal change 
in the root or theme, instead of by external additions alone. 
This tendency is generally regarded as constituting the 
highest characteristic of the Indo-European dialects, as 
making them properly infective ; aud languages possessing 
in this sense an infective character are reckoned to stand at 
the head of all the forms of human speech. Some, however, 
are inclined to claim a more original and fundamentel im- 
portance for the process of internal change in the history of 
the tongues of our family, to regard a capacity of significant 
variation of vowel as inherent in their roots, and bearing a 
regular and conspicuous part in even the earliest steps 
of their development. The evidence upon which this claim 
is founded I cannot but regard as altogether insuflicient to 
sustain it. Wherever, in the most ancient as well as the 
more modern processes of word-formation and inflection, we 
find internal changes of the root, they are, I am persuaded, 
of secondary growth, inorganic; they are called out ulti- 
mately by phonetic causes, not originated for the purpose of 
marking variation of meaning, though sometimes seized and 
applied to that purpose. To prove the element of internal 
flection one of prime value in the growth of Indo-European 
language, it would be necessary to show that the variation 
of vowel had a distinctly assignable office in the primitive 
production of words; that it regularly distinguished from 
one another certain parts of speech, certain classes of de- 
rivatives, certain forms of declension or conjugation ; that it 
formed guiding analogies, which could be and actually were 
imitated continuously in the further processes of word- 
making. But this is far from being the case; on the con. 


294 INDO-EUROPEAN INFLECTION. [LEoT. 


trary, the phenomena bear everywhere an irregular and 
sporadic character: the change of vowel in the oldest de- 
rivatives is only an accompaniment of derivation by means 
of suffixes; it has no constant significance; it acquires 
significance only at second hand, in the manner of a result, 
not a cause ; and it remains everywhere as barren of forma- 
tive force as in the Germanic verbs (where, as was shown _ 
in the third lecture, its infeeundity led to the construction — 
of a new scheme of conjugation), or as in our irregular 
plurals like men and feet, from man and foot. Only, therefore, 
so far as it is regarded as an effect and sign of thorough in- 
tegration of elements, of complete unity of designation, can 
we accept internal change as an exponent of the superiority 
of Indo-European speech. 

But the peculiarities belonging to the character of our 
family of languages will be more clearly apprehensible when 
we shall have taken a survey of the other principal forms of 
human speech, to which, accordingly, after these necessary 
introductory remarks, we now turn. . We shall take up the 
families in an order partly geographical, and partly based 
upon a consideration of their respective importance. 

On both these grounds, there can be no question as to 
which group of languages, outside of the Indo-European 
domain, ought first to receive our attention. It is evidently 
that one which includes as its principal branches the Hebrew, 
the Syriac, and the Arabic. From the names of its two ex- 
treme members, it is sometimes styled the Syro-Arabian family; 
but its usual and familiar designation is Semitic or Shemitie, 
derived from the name of the patriarch Shem, son of Noah, 
who in Geuesis is made the ancestor of most of the nations 
that speak its dialects. It is a very distinctly marked group, 
and, though occupying but a limited tract in the south- 
western corner of Asia, with some of the adjacent parts 
of Africa, is of the highest consequence, by reason of the 
conspicuous part which the race to which it belongs has 
played in the history of the world. This is too well known 
to require to be referred to here otherwise than in the 
briefest manner. 

The Phenicians, inhabiting Tyre, Sidon, and the adjacent 


VIII. SEMITIC LANGUAGE. 295 


parts of the Mediterranean coast, and speaking a dialect so 
nearly akin with the Hebrew that its scanty remains are 
eead with no great difficulty by the aid of that language, 
have been wont to be accounted as the first to give the race 
prominence in general history. The part which they played 
was of the most honourable and useful character. Their 
commercial enterprise widely extended the limits of geograph- 
ical knowledge, and bound together distant peoples by the 
ties of mutual helpfulness ; their colonies opened to civiliza- 
tion the countries bordering the Mediterranean, and prepared 
the way for the extension of Greek and Roman culture. A 
significant indication of the far-reaching and _ beneficent 
nature of their activity is to be seen in the fact that a large 
portion of the world’s alphabets, including many of those 
which have the widest range, and have been used by the 
most cultivated nations, come from the Phenician alphabet 
as their ultimate source. To great political importance the 
Phenicians never attained, except in their most flourishing 
colony, Carthage, which, as we well know, disputed for a time 
with the Romans the empire of the world. 

But it must not fail to be noticed that, even before the 
rise of the Phenician world-commerce, there were great 
Semitic empires in Mesopotamia, that country where the idea 
of universal empire appears to have had its origin and its first 
realization, and where some of the earliest germs of world- 
civilization sprang up and were nursed. The mixture of 
nationalities and of cultures which contended in that arena 
for the mastery during tens of centuries, until the Indo- 
European Persians subjected all beneath their sway, is most 
intricate, and as yet only partially understood: the know- 
ledge of its intricacy, and the hopeful means of its final solu- 
tion, were given together, but a few years since, in the dis- 
covery and decipherment of the monuments of Nineveh and 
Babylon, of the records known as “cuneiform,” from the 
shape of the characters in which they are written. These 
records are abundant, and of various content, consisting 
not in inscriptions alone, but in whole libraries of annals 
and works of science and literature, stamped upon tablets 
and cylinders of burnt clay ; but their examination is as yet 


296 SEMITIC HISTORY, [ LECT. 


too incomplete, and the results drawn from it too fragment. 
ary and uncertain, to allow of our taking any detailed notice 
of them here; the questions which they affect are still 
under judgment, and only the very few who have made pro- 
found and original studies among the monuments can venture 
to speak respecting them with authority. It is enough for 
us to note that the Semitic race was prominent, and during 
a long period preéminent, in Mesopotamia, and that a highly 
important part of its history, and of the history of Semitic 
language, is coming to light as the fruit of cuneiform studies. 
During all this time there was enacting—behind a screen, 
as it were—a part of Semitic history which was to prove of 
incomparably greater importance to the world than Pheni- 
cian commerce or Babylonian empire. The little people of 
the Hebrews was politically a most insignificant item in the 
sum of human affairs; but its religion, made universal by 
Christ, has become the mightiest element in human history ; 
its wonderful ancient literature is the work which all en- 
lightened nations of the present day unite in calling Bible, 
that is, ‘the book ;’ its language is even now more studied 
than any other outside the pale of Indo-European speech. 
And yet once more, in comparatively modern times, long 
after Mesopotamian empire, and Phenician commerce, and 
Carthaginian lust of conquest, and Jewish temple-worship, 
hac. passed away for ever, extinguished in the extinction of 
those several nativnalities, a new branch of the Semitic race, 
which till then had slumbered in inaction and insignificance 
in the deserts of Arabia, awoke all at once to the call of 
a great religious teacher, Mohammed, burst its limits, over- 
whelmed Asia, Africa, and no small part of Europe, and 
flowered out suddenly and brilliantly in science, art, and 
philosophy, attaining a combined political and literary 
eminence to which no Semitic people had made before any 
approach, and threatening to wrench the leadership of 
human destiny from the keeping of the enfeebled races of 
Europe. Finally, corrupted within, and foiled and broken 
without, it sank again into comparative obscurity ; and with 
it went down, probably for ever, the star of Semitic glory 
and importance in the external history of the world; al 


vitt.] LANGUAGE, AND LITERATURES. * 297 


though half inankind still own the sway of Semitic religious 
ideas and institutions. 
The Semitic dialects are divided into three principal 
branches: the northern, comprehending the idioms of Syria 
and Assyria, and usually called the Aramaic ; the central, or 
Canaanitic, composed of the Hebrew and Phenician, with the 
Punic; and the southern, or Arabic, including, besides the 
proper or literary Arabic and the dialects most closely akin 
with it, the Himyaritic in the south-western region of the 
peninsula, and the outliers of the latter in Africa, the literary 
Ethiopie or Geéz, the Amharic, and other Abyssinian dialects. 
Passing over the Mesopotamian records, as of an age and 
character not yet fully established, the Hebrew literature is 
by far the oldest which the family has to show, and, as is 
known to every one, ranks among the oldest in the world. 
From a time anterior, doubtless, to that of Moses, the works 
of the Hebrew annalists, poets, and prophets cover the whole 
period of Jewish history until some four centuries before 
Christ, when the Hebrew had ceased to exist as a vernacular 
language, and was replaced by the Chaldee or Aramaic, the 
dialect of Syria. But it has never ceased to be read, 
written, and even to some extent spoken, by the learned, 
from that time until now—especially since the revival of its 
use, and the purification of its style, among the scattered 
Jewish populations of Europe, following upon the expulsion 
of the Jews from Spain in the twelfth century. Of the 
degraded and mixed Hebrew used as the learned dialect of 
the Rabbins, not far from the begining of our era, the 
Mishna is the most important monument. The Samaritan 
is another impure dialect of the Hebrew, so permeated with 
Aramaic elements as to be a kind of medium between 
Hebrew and Aramaic. Its oldest monument, a version of 
the Pentateuch, is referred to the first century of our era. 
It seems at present to be on the point of extinction. 
Phenicia has left us no literature. The coffin of one of 
the kings of Sidon, found but a few years since, presents in 
its detailed inscription a fuller view of the Phenician tongue 
than is derivable from all its other known records, taken 
together. A few inscriptions, and a mutilated and obscure 


298 * SEMITIC LITERATURES. [LEUT. 


fraement ina play of the Roman poet Plautus, whereof the 
scene is laid in Carthage, are the only relics left us of the 
idiom of that queently city. 

The earliest records of Aramaic speech are the so-called 
Chaldee passages found in some of the later books of the 
Hebrew Bible (a single verse in Jeremiah, and longer 
passages in Esdras and Daniel). Other products of the 
literary use by the Jews of the same language are the 
Targums, or paraphrases of Scripture, dating from about the 
time of Christ, and the Talmuds, of the fourth and fifth 
centuries. But in the second century, with the translation 
ot the whole Bible into the language of Syria (usually called 
the Peshito version), begins an important Christian Syriac 
literature, of which considerable portions are still preserved 
to us. It flourished especially between the fourth and ninth 
centuries. Besides the valuable historical information, touch- 
ing the early ages of the Christian church, which it records, 
it played an important part in transmitting to the Arabs the 
literature, science, and philosophy of the Greeks. Its career 
was brought to a close, and even the Syriac idiom itself nearly 
crowded out of existence, by the rise and rapid extension 
of the Arabic, in the centuries after Mohammed. But the 
ancient Syriac is still the sacred dialect of the feeble bodies 
of Christians in Asia wh’ch represent the Syriac church ; and 
its modern representatires, much corrupted in form and of 
mixed material, are even now spoken by a few scattered com- 
munities. With one of these communities, the Nestorians 
of Orumiah and its vicinity—scanty remains of a sect which 
once sent its missionaries into the remotest regions of Asia, 
into India, Mongolia, and China—the labours of American 
missionaries have lately made our public well acquainted. 
A modern Syriac literature is growing up once more under 
their auspices. 

Besides these two Aramaic literatures, the one Jewish and 
the other Christian, it is believed that there has existed 
another, of native origin and of character more truly 
national; but it is now lost, doubtless beyond recovery. 
Traditions of ancient Chaldean learning attach themselves to 
the naine Nabatean, and one or two curious books have been 


VIII. | SEMITIC LITERATURES. . 299 


recently brought to light out of the Arabic literature, claim- 
ing to be versions of Nabatean works of a very high an- 
tiquity : but they are generally regarded as literary impos- 
tures, containing only a scanty, if an appreciable, element of 
what is genuine and ancient. In the practices and traditions 
of the Mendaites and Sabians are also seen traces of an 
indigenous Chaldean culture. 

The oldest monuments belonging to the southern or 
Arabian branch of Semitic speech are the inscriptions dis- 
covered in the south-western corner of the great peninsula. 
They represent a language very different from the classical 
Arabic, as the character and civilization of the Sabeans and 
Himyarites, from whom they come, appear to have been very 
unlike those of the Arabs of the desert. Their exact period 
is hitherto unknown. Language and civilization have alike 
been almost wholly supplanted, since the rise of Islamism, 
by the conquering Arabic, only obscure relics of them being 
left in the Ehkili and other existing idioms of the south. 
Most nearly akin with the Himyaritic is the speech of the 
neighbouring region of Africa, which was unquestionably 
peopled from southern Ar abia, by emigration across the Red 
Sea. The ancient tongue of Abyssinia, the Ethiopic or 
Geéz, has a literature, ‘wholly of Christian origin and con- 
tent, coming down from the fourth century of our era: its 
earliest monument is a version of the Bible. As a culti- 
vated and current language, it has been gradually crowded 
out of use during the past six centuries by the Amharic, 
another dialect of the same stock, but of a more corrupt and 
barbarous character, 

Immensely superior in value to all the other Semitic 
literatures, excepting the Hebrew, although latest in date of 
them all, is that which is written in the Arabic tongue. Its 
beginning is nearly contemporaneous with the rise .of the 
Arab people to historical importance: the Koran, collected 
and written down, about the middle of the seventh century, 
from the records and traditions of Mohammed’s revelations, 
is its starting-point. Only a few poems, of no great length, 
belong to an age somewhat earlier; and the inscriptions of 
Sinai and of Petra, which go back nearly to, or even some- 


300 CHARACTERISTICS OF [ LECT. 


what beyond, the Christian era, give scanty representation of 
dialects nearly kindred. That which we call the Arabic was, 
anterior to Mohammed, the spoken dialect of the tribes 
occupying the central part of the country ; that is to say, of 
that part of the population which was of purest Semitic 
blood, and less affected than any other, in language, manners, 
and institutions, by disturbing foreign influences. As a 
natural consequence of the political and religious revolution 
by which Islamism became the religion, first of Arabia, then 
of so large a portion of Asia and Africa, this dialect has 
had a career almost comparable with that of the Latin. It 
has extinguished nearly all the other dialects of the Semitic 
family within their ancient limits; it has spread over Egypt 
and the whole northern coast of Africa; the language of 
Spain, and yet more the Hindustani of central India, have 
borrowed abundantly of its material; the modern literary 
Persian and Turkish have their vocabularies made up almost 
more of Arabic words than of those of native growth. Of 
the wonderfully rich and various Arabic literature, of the part 
it played in the preservation and transmission of classical 
learning to modern times, of the treasures of information it 
contains respecting the history and geography of the Orient, 
it is not necessary here to speak; the theme belongs to 
literary, not to linguistic, history. We turn to a consider- 
ation of the chief peculiarities of Semitic language. 

The Semitic type of speech is called inflective, like the 
Indo-European, and philologists are accustomed to allow the 
title to no other languages than these two. We must 
beware, however, of supposing that this inclusion in one 


morphological class imphes any genetic relationship between . 


the families, or is to be regarded as even suggesting the prob- 
ability of their common descent. There is between them, 
on the contrary, only such a resemblance as is due to a 
correspondence of natural endowments in the language- 
making races. Semitic inflection is so totally diverse from 
Indo-European inflection, that the historical transition from 
the one to the other, or from a common original to both, is 
of a difficulty which cannot be exceeded. The Semitie 
tengues possess in many respects a more peculiar and isolated 


vat. ] SEMITIC LANGUAGE. 801 


character than any others which exist. Their most funda. 
mental characteristic is the triliterality of their roots. With 
rare and insignificant exceptions, every Semitie verbal root 
—the pronominal roots are not subject to the same law— 
contains just three consonants, no more and no less. More- 
over, it is composed of consonants alone. ‘That is to say: 
whereas, in the Indo-European and other tongues, the 
radical vowel is as essential a part of the root as any other, 
even though more liable than the consonants to phonetic 
alteration, in the Semitic, on the other hand, the vocalization 
of the radical consonants is almost solely a means of gram- 
matical flexion. Only the consonants of the root are 
radical or significant elements; the vowels are formative or 
relational. Thus, for example, the three consonants q-t-l 
form a root (Arabic) which conveys the idea of ‘killing:’ 
then gatala means ‘he killed;’ gutila, ‘he was killed;’ 
quitli, ‘they were killed;’ ugtwl, ‘kill;’ gatil, ‘killing ;’ 
igtal, ‘causing to kill;’ gatl, ‘murder;’ gitl, ‘enemy ;’ 
qutl, ‘murderous;’ and so on. Along with this internal 
fiection is found the use of external formative elements, both 
suffixes and prefixes, and also, to a limited extent, infixes, or 
inserted letters or syllables ; yet they are but little relied on, 
and play only a subordinate part, as compared with their 
analogues in the languages of other races; the main portion 
of the needed inflection is provided for by means of the 
varying vocalization of the root, and what remains for 
aifixes to do is comparatively trifling. The aggregation of 
affix upon affix, the formation of derivative from derivative, 
so usual with us (it was illustrated in a former lecture by 
such examples as inapplicabilities and untruthfully), is a 
thing almost unknown in the domain of Semitic speech. 
This truly Procrustean uniformity of the Semitic roots, and 
this capacity of significant internal change, separate the 
languages to which they belong by a wide and almost 
impassable gulf from all others spoken by the human race. 
So far as we can discover, thevarying vocalization of the roots 
in these languages is an ultimate fact, and directly and 
organically indicative of a variation of meaning: it is not, 
like the occasional phenomena of a somewhat similar char- 


e 


802 CHARACTERISTICS OF [LECT 


acter presented by the Indo-European languages, a distinc. 
tion originally euphonic, and afterwards made significant. 
We can point out the influences which have made men the 
plural of man, led the preterit of lead; we can trace back 
set and sang to forms in which their distinction from sit and 
sing was conveyed by formative elements added from without 
to the root; but no historical researches bring the Semitic 
scholar to, or even perceptibly toward, any such explanation 
of the forms he is studying. Now and then a kind of 
symbolism is pretty distinctly traceable: the weaker vowels 
+ and « sometimes convey by their use an intimation of less 
active or transitive meaning, as compared with the strong 
fulla: thus, the act of ‘killing’ is expressed by gatala, but 
the conditions of ‘being sorry,’ of ‘ being beautiful,’ by 
‘hazina, ‘hasuna ; and especially, every active verb, like gatala, 
has its corresponding passive gutila. But such considera- 
tions can explain only a small portion of the derivatives from 
Semitic roots; the genesis of the rest is an unsolved 
problem, of extremest difficulty. The triplicity of radical 
consonants is an equally primitive characteristic of all the 
Semitic tongues, yet there are not wanting certain apparent 
indications that it is the result of historical development. 
To make out the required number of three, some roots con- 
tain the same consonant doubled; in others, one of the three 
is a weak or servile letter, hardly more than a hiatus, or it is 
a semivowel which seems to have been developed out of an 
original vowel; further, there are groups of roots of some- 
what kindred signification which agree in two of their con- 
sonants, so that the third is plausibly conjectured to be an 
introduced letter, having the effect to differentiate a general 
meaning once conveyed by the other two alone. Guided by 
such signs, and urged on by the presumed necessity in theory 
for regarding triliterality as not absolutely original, scholars 
have repeatedly made the attempt to reduce these roots to 
an earlier and simpler condition, out of which they should be 
accounted a historic growth—but hitherto with only indif- 
ferent success ; we are yet far from attaining any satisfactory 
understanding of the beginnings of Semitic speech. It is 
suggested with much plausibility that the universality of the 


. 


VIII. | SEMITIC LANGUAGE. 303 


three root-letters may be due to the inorganic and arbitrary 
extension of an analogy which had by some means become a 
dominant one; and that, in attaining thcir present form, 
the roots have prevailingly passed through the condition of 
derivative nouns. The Semitic verbal forms show many 
signs of a more immediate and proximate development out 
of forms of nouns than is to be traced in the structure of 
the Indo-European verb. * 

In no small part of its structure, the Semitic verb differs 
very strikingly trom the Indo-European. It distinguishes, 
indeed, the same three numbers, singular, dual, and plural, 
and the same persons, first, second, and third, and its per- 
sonal endings are to a considerable extent formed in the 
Same manner, by adding pronominal elements to the verbal 
root. But in the second and third persons it makes a 
farther distinction of the gender of the subject: thus, 
gatalat, ‘she killed,’ is different from gatala, ‘he killed.’ 
What is of much more consequence is that its representa- 
tion of the important element of time is quite diverse from 
ours. The antithesis of past, present, and future, which 
seems to us so fundamental and necessary, the Semitic mind 
has ignored, setting up but two tenses, whose separate uses 
are to no small extent interchangeable and difficult of 
distinct definition, but whereof the one denotes chiefly com- 
pleted action, the other incomplete ; each of them admitting 
of employment, in different circumstances, as_ past, present, 
or future. The perfect or preterit is the more original, and 
its persons are formed by appended proneminal endings ; the 
imperfect (sometimes called future) has the terminations of 
number belonging to a noun, and indicates person and 
gender by prefixes: thus, the three masculine persons in the 
singular are agtulu, tagtulu, and yagtulu ; the third, mascu- 
line and feminine, dual, are yagtulani and taqtulant ; plural, 
yagtulina and yagtulna. To the imperfect belongs a sub- 
junctive and imperative, and one or two other less common 
quasi-modal forms. But of the wealth of modal expression 
into which our own verb has always tended to develop, in a 


* See A. Schleicher, in the Transactions of the Saxon Academy (Leipsig 
1865), vol. iv. (of the phil.-historical series), p. 514 sq. 


304 CHARACTERISTICS OF [LECT 


synthetic or an analytic way, that of the Semites hag 
generated very little; its proneness is rather to the multi- 
plication of such distinctions as are called conjugational, 
to the characterizing of the verbal action as in its nature 
transitive, causal, intensive, iterative, conative, reflexive, or 
the like: thus, gatala meaning ‘he killed, gattala means 
‘he killed with violence, massacred ;’ gdtala, ‘he tried to 
kill;’ agtala, ‘he caused to kill;’ ctxgatala, ‘he killed him- 
self;’ and so on. Each Arabic verb has theoretically fifteen 
such conjugations; and near a dozen of them, each with its 
own passive, are in tolerably frequent and familiar use ; in 
the other dialects, the scheme is less completely filled out. 
Verbal nouns and adjectives, or infinitives and participles, 
belong likewise to every conjugation. 

In their nouns, the Semites distinguish only two genders, 
masculine and feminine. They have, of course, the same 
three numbers here as in the verb. Distinctions of case, 
however, are almost entirely deficient; only the Arabic 
makes a scanty separation of nominative and accusative, or 
of nominative, genitive, and accusative; and opinions still 
differ as to whether this is to be regarded as a separate 
acquisition made by the Arabic alone, or as an original 
possession of the whole family, lost by the other branches: 
the latter is probably the correcter view. 

The simple copula, the verb fo be, is generally wanting in 
the Semitic languages: for “the man is good” they say, 
“the man good” (often with a form of the adjective which 
indicates that it is used predicatively, rather than attribu- 
tively), or “ the man, he good.” They are poor in connec- 
tives and particles; and this, with the deficiency of modal 
forms in the verb, gives to their syntax a peculiar character 
of simplicity and baldness: the Semite strings his assertions 
together, just putting one after the other, with an and or a 
but interposed, where the Indo-European twines his into a 
harmoniously proportioned and many-membered period. 
The same stiffness and rigidity which these languages show 
in respect to word-development appears also in their deyelop- 
ment of signification. While it is characteristic of our 
mode of s;eech that we use such words as comprehend, under- 


VIII. SEMITIC LANGUAGE. B05 


stand, forgive, as if they originally and always meant just 
what we employ them to express—not giving a thought ta 
the metaphor, often striking, or even startling, which they 
eontain—in the Semitic, the metaphor usually shows plainly 
through, and cannot be lost sight of. The language of the 
Semite, then, is rather pictorial, forcible, vivid, than adapted 
to calm and reasoning philosophy. 

The various dialects of this family stand in a very close 
relationship with one another, hardly presenting such differ- 
ences even as are found within the limits of a single branch 
of the Indo-European family: they are to one another like 
German, Dutch, and Swedish, for example, rather than like 
German, Welsh, and Persian. This fact, however, does not 
at all prove their separation to have taken place at a later 
period than that of the Indo-European branches ; for, during 
its whole recorded history, Semitic speech has shown itself 
far less variable, less liable to phonetic change and corrup- 
tion, less fertile of new words and forms, of new themes and 
apparent roots, than our own. And the reasons, at least in 
part, are not difficult to discover. Each Semitic word, as a 
general rule, presents distinctly to the consciousness of him 
who employs it its three radical consonants, with its comple- 
ment of vowels, each one of which has a recognized part to 
play in determining the significance of the word, and cannot 
be altered, or exchanged for another, without violating a 
governing énalogy, without defacing its intelligibility. The 
genesis of new forms, moreover, is rendered well-nigh im- 
possible by the fact that such a thing as a Semitic compound 
is almost totally unknown: the habit of the language, from 
its earliest period, has forbidden that combination of inde- 
pendent elements which is the first step toward their fusion 
into a form. Hence everything in Semitic speech wears au 
aspect of peculiar rigidity and persistence. In its primitive 
development—as development we cannot but believe it to 
have been, however little comprehensible by us—it assumed 
so marked and individual a type that it has since been com- 
paratively exempt from variation. In no other family of 
human speech would it be possible that the most antique 
and original of its dialects, the fullest in its forms, the mest 

20 


306 RELATION OF SEMITIC [LEOT. 


uncorrupted in its phonetic structure, the most faithful 
representative of the ideal type inherent in them all, should 
be the youngest of theiz number. But such is the character 
of the classical Arabic, whose earliest literary monuments 
are from fifteen to twenty centuries later than those of the 
Hebrew and Assyrian. There is reason, however, it should 
be remarked, to suspect that the Hebrew as we have it does 
not in all points truly represent the language of the earliest 
period of Hebrew history, that it has both partaken of the 
modernization of the popular tongue, and suffered some dis- 
tortion in the hands of the grammarians from whom we 
receive it. The spoken vernaculars of the present day, 
while they exhibit something of the same character as the 
modern Indo-European dialects, in the abbreviation of words, 
the loss of inflectional forms, and the obscuration of etymo- 
logical relations, yet do so in a much less degree. The 
modern Syriac of Orumiah has decidedly more of the aspect 
of a European analytic Janguage than any other existing 
dialect of its family, and even more than, a few years ago, 
Semitic scholars were willing to believe possible. But its 
predecessor, the ancient Syriac, had been itself distinguished 
by like peculiarities among the contemporaneous and older 
dialects ; having felt, perhaps, the modifying influence of 
the strange peoples and cultures by which Syria was shut 
in, invaded, and more than once subdued. 

It may be hoped’that wider and deeper study will succeed 
one day in casting additional light upon the difficulties of 
Semitic linguistic history. The dialect which is now in 
process of construction out of the recently discovered cunei- 
form monuments is claimed to possess some peculiar charac- 
teristics, yet it appears to be too decidedly accordant with 
the rest in its general structure to play other than a subor- 
dinate part, by farther illustrating that part of the course 
of development with which we are already more or less 
familiar, It is confidently claimed, however, by some lin- 
guistic scholars (although as confidently denied by others), 
that the ancient tongue of Egypt, and a considerable group 
of the 'anguages of northern Africa, have traces, still dise 
tinctly visible, of a far remoter connection with this family 


Vili. ] AND INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE. 307 


a connection anterior to the full elaboration of the funda- 
mental peculiarities of Semitic language which we have been 
considering. If this claim shall be established by maturer 
investigation, there will be reason to look for important 
revelations as the result of comparisons made between the 
two classes. The often-asserted relationship between the 
beginnings of Indo-European and of Semitic speech does 
not at present offer any appreciable promise of valuable light 
to be thrown upon their joint and respective history. It 
must be evident, I think, from the foregoing exposition, that 
the whole fabric and style of these two families of language 
is so discordant, that any theory which assumes their joint 
development out of the radical stage, the common growth of. 
their grammatical systems, is wholly excluded. If corre- 
spondence thee be between them, it must lie in their roots, 
and it must have existed before the special working-over of 
the Semitic rovts into their present form. It will be time, 
then, to talk uf the signs of Indo-European and Semitic 
unity when the earliest process of Semitic growth is better 
understood, its effects distinguished from the yet earlier 
material upon which they were wrought. Against so deep 
and pervading a discordance, the surface analogies hitherto 
brought to light have no convincing weight. The identifi- 
cation is a very alluring theme: the near agreement of the 
peoples speaking these two classes of languages in respect to 
physical structure and mental capacity, their position as the 
two great white races, joint leaders in the world’s history, 
taken in connection with their geographical neighbourhood 
and an apparent agreement between the traditions held by 
some nations of each touching their earliest homes and fates, 
are inducements which have spurred on many a linguist to 
search for verbal and radical coincidences in the tongues of 
both, and to regard with a degree of credence such as he 
appeared to find—while, nevertheless, if the same coinci- 
dences were found to exist, along with the same differences, 
between our languages and those of some congeries of Poly- 
nesian or African tribes, they would at once be dismissed as 
of no value or account. To claim, then, that the common 


descent of Indo-European and Semitic races has been proved 
20 * 


308 SEMITIC SPEECH AND CHARACTER. [LECT. 


by the evidence of their speech is totally unjustifiable ; the 
utmost which can be asserted is that language affords 
certain indications, of doubtful value, which, taken along 
with certain other ethnological considerations, also of ques- 
tionable pertinency, furnish ground for suspecting -an ulti- 
mate relationship. The question, in short, is not yet ripe 
for settlement. Whether the better comprehension of the 
history of Semitic speech which further research may give 
will enable us to determine it with confidence, need not 
here be considered: while such a result is certainly not to 
be expected with confidence, it may perhaps be looked for 
with hope. 

To discuss the Semitic character, and to show how in its 
striking features it accords with Semitic speech, would be a 
most interesting task, but lies aside from the proper course 
of our inquiries, Through the might of their religious ideas, 
this people have governed, and will continue to govern, the 
civilized world; but in other respects, in that gradual work- 
ing-out of ethnic endowment and capacity which constitutes 
the history of a race, they have shown themselves decidedly 
inferior to the other great ruling family, and their forms of 
speech undeniably partake of this inferiority. The time is 
long past when reverence for the Hebrew Scriptures as the 
Book of books could carry with it the corollary that the 
Hebrew tongue was the most perfect and the oldest of all 
known languages, and even the mother of the rest: it isnow 
fully recognized as merely one in a contracted and very 
peculiar group of sister dialects, crowded together in a corner 
of Asia and the adjacent parts of Africa, possessing striking 
excellences, but also marked with striking defects, and not 
yet proved genetically connected with any other existing 
group. 

The family of languages to which we haye next to direct 
our attention is one of much wider geographical range, and 
more varied linguistic character. As usually constructed, it 
eovers with its branches the whole northern portion of the 
eastern continent, through both Europe and Asia, together 
with the greater part of central Asia, and portions of Asiatic 
and European territory lying still further south. 1t is 


vu. | SCYTHIAN LANGUAGE, 303 


known by many different names: some call it the Altaic, or 
the Ural-Altaic, family, from the chains of mountains which 
are supposed to have served as centres of dispersion to 
its tribes ; others style it, from one or other of its principal 
branches, the Mongolian, or the Tataric; the appellation 
Turanian has also won great currency within no long time, 
owing to its adoption by one or two very conspicuous au- 
thorities in linguistic ethnology, although recommended 
neither by its derivation nor its original application (we 
shall speak more particularly of both later); Scythian, 
finally, is a title which it has sometimes received, taken from 
the name by which the Greeks knew the wild nomad races of 
the extreme north-east, which were doubtless in part, at 
least, of this kindred—and the designation Scythian we will 
here employ, as, upon the whole, though far from being unex- 
ceptionable, best answering our purpose. 

Five principal branches compose the family. The first of 
them, the Ugrian, or Finno-Hungarian, is almost wholly Eu- 
ropean in its position and known history. It includes the 
language of the Laplanders, the race highest in latitude, but 
lowest in stature and in developed capacity, of any in Eu- 
rope ; that of the Finns in north-western Russia, with related 
dialects in Esthonia and Livonia; those of several tribes, of no 
great numbers or consequence, stretching from the southern 
Ural mountains toward the interior of Russia and down the 
Volga—as the Permians, Siryanians, Wotiaks, Cheremisses, 
and Mordwins ; and the tongue of the Hungarians or Mag- 
yars, far in the south, with those of their kindred, the 
Ostiaks and Woguls, in and beyond the central chain of the 
Ural—which was the region whence the rude ancestors of 
the brave and noble race,who now people Hungary fought 
their way down to the Danube, within the historical period, 
or hardly a thousand years ago. 

The second branch is the Samoyedic, nearest akin with the 
Ugrian, yet apparently independent of it. It occupies the 
territory along the northern coast of Europe and Asia, from 
the White Sea across the lower Yenisei, and almost to the 
Lena, one of the most barren and inhospitable tracts of the 
whole continent ; while some of its dialects are spoken in the 


4 


310 BRANCHES OF [LEoT. 


mountains to the south, about the head waters of the Yenisei— 
probably indicating the region whence the Samoyed tribes were 
driven, or wandered, northward, following the river-courses, 
and spreading out upon the shores of the northern ocean, 
What is known of them and their speech is mainly the fruit 
of the devoted labours of the intrepid traveller Castrén. The 
Samoyed dialects are destitute of literary cultivation and of 
records, and the wild people who speak them are without in- 
terest or consequence, in the present or the past, save simply 
as human beings. No other branch of the family has so 
little to recommend it to our notice. : 

The third branch includes the languages spoken by the 
Turkish tribes,-a race which has played a part in modern 
history not altogether insignificant. Their earliest wander- 
ings and conquests are doubtfully read in the annals of the 
Chinese empire, and their long struggles with the Iranian 
peoples in their border-lands are conspicuous themes of Per- 
sian heroic tradition. It was in the ninth and tenth cen- 
turies that they finally broke forth from their dreary abodes 
on the great plateau of central Asia; falling upon the 
eastern provinces of the already decaying Mohammedan 
caliphate, they hastened its downfall and divided its inherit- 
ance; and their victorious arms were carried steadily west- 
ward, until,in the middle of the fifteenth century, they were 
masters of Constantinople and of all that was left of the 
Greek empire ; nor was their progress toward the heart of 
Europe checked but by the most heroic and long-continued 
efforts on the part of Magyars, Germans, and Slavonians, 
Their modern history, and their present precarious position 
upon the border of Europe, are too well known to eall for 
more than an allusion. The subdivisions of the branch are 
numerous, and they cover a territory of very wide extent, 
reaching from the eastern edge of the Austrian dominions, 
through Asia Minor, Tatary, and Chinese Tatary, to beyond 
the centre of the Asiatic continent, while their outliers are 
found even along the Lena, to its mouth, in northernmost 
Siberia. They are classed together in three principal groups ; 
first, the northern, of which the Kirghiz, Bashkir, and Yakut 
ao the most important members ; they occupy (with the 


Vil. ] SCYTHIAN LANGUAGE. 81k 


exception of the Yakut in the extreme north-east) southern 
Siberia and Tatary, between the Volga and the Yenisei; 
second, the south-eastern, including the Uigurs, Usbeks, 
Turkomans, etc., and ranging from the southern Caspian, 
eastward to- the middle of the great platean; third, the 
western, stretching through northern Persia, the Caucasus, 
the Crimea, and Asia Minor, to the Bosphorus, and scattered 
in. patches amid the varied populations which fill the European 
dominions of the Sultan. This division, however, is rather 
geographical than linguistic: the nearer mutual relations of 
the different dialects are still, in great part, to be deter- 
mined. They compose together a very distinct body of 
nearly kindred forms of speech, not differing from one 
another in anything like the same degree as the Ugrian lan- 
guages. It is even claimed, although with questionable truth, 
that a Yakut of the Lena and a man of the lower orders 
at Constantinople could still make shift to communicate to- 
gether. 

The fourth branch of Scythian language is the Mongolian, 
The Mongols, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, ran a 
-wonderful career of conquest, overwhelming nearly all the 
monarchies of Asia, and reducing even the eastern countries 
of Europe to subjection. The Mongol emperor Kublai 
Khan, reigning from the borders of Germany to the coasts 
of south-eastern Asia, with his capital in China, the most 
populous and at that time well-nigh the most enlightened 
country of the earth, governed such a realm as the world 
never saw, before or since. ~ But the unwieldy mass fell in 
pieces almost as rapidly as it had been brought together. 
The horribly devastating wars by which Mongol dominion 
was established were neither attended nor followed by any 
compensating benefits: they were a tempest of barbarian 
fury, to be thought of only with a shudder, and with grati- 
tude for its brevity. The Mongols themselves were but the 
leaders in the movement, which was in great part executed 
by hordes of Turkish descent. A Mongol dynasty held pos- 
session of the Chinese throne for a century, until expelled, 
about A.D. 1865, by a successful revolt of the native race. 
At present, the still powerful remains of this once so xe. 


312 SCYTHIAN LANGUAGES AND [LEOT. 


doubtable people are living in quiet and insignificance, as 
dependents of the Chinese empire. Their territory ia 
bounded in the south by the Tibetan frontier, and extends 
thence eastward to the border of China, northward to lake 
Dzaisang, north-eastward to beyond lake Baikal, and to the 
edge of Manchuria, including the upper waters of the Lena 
and the Amoor, Their scattered fragments, too, are left m 
zlmost every country westward to the Volga, and a consider- 
able colony of them are to be found upon both sides of the 
Volga, to some distance above its mouth. The Khalkas, 
Kalmucks, and Buriats are the most notable of their tribes, 
The fifth and last branch is called the Tungusice. It oe- 
cupies a broad tract of north-eastern Asia, from the frontier 
of China on the north to the Arctic Ocean, and from the 
neighbourhood of the Yenisei almost to Kamchatka. Its 
most conspicuous dialect, the Manchu, belongs to tribes 
which have established a claim upon the attention of the 
world by their conquest of China a little more than two cen- 
turies ago (A.D. 1644). In wielding the forces of that 
mighty empire, they long displayed a consummate ability ; 
but their administration, attacked at once by foreign en- 
croachment and domestic revolt, has now for some time been 
marked with fatal weakness : Scythian power seems at pre- 
sent not less decadent in the extreme East than in the 
West. This is not the first time that Tungusian races have 
built up their power upon a Chinese foundation. The 
powerful dynasties of Khitan and Kin, from the beginning 
of the tenth century to near the middle of the thirteenth, 
held a great part of northern China in subjection, though 
not to the entire subversion of the empire: like the modern 
Manchus, they adopted and perpetuated the Chinese institu- 
tions and culture. The realm of the Kin was one of the 
many which went down before the Mongolian onset. The 
Manchus call by the name Orochon, ‘ reindeer-possessors,’ 
all Tungusian tribes excepting their own: respecting their 
mutual relations little is known in detail: they are depend- 
ences partly of the Chinese empire, partly of the Russian. 
The brief survey of the history of the Scythian races with 
which we have thus accompanied our statement of their di« 


Vill. | SCYTHIAN LITERATURES. 313 


visions is sufficient to set forth clearly the subordinate part 
they have played in human affairs. War and devastation 
have been the sphere in which their activity has chiefly 
manifested itself. Some of them have shown for a time no 
mean capacity in governing and managing their conquests. 
But they have had no aptitude for helping the advance of 
civilization, and but little, in general, even for appropriating 
the knowledge and culture of their subjects or their neigh- 
bours. The Manchus have written their language during 
some centuries past ; but they have nothing which deserves 
the name of a national literature ; their books are transla- 
tions or servile imitations of Chinese works. The Mongol 
literature goes back to the thirteenth century, the period 
when the race rose to importance in history, but is almost 
equally scanty. The Mongol alphabet was the original of 
the present Manchu, and, in its turn, was derived from that 
of the Uigur Turks; the latter, again, goes back to the 
Syriac, having been brought into central Asia ty Nestorian 
missionaries. The Uigurs, the easternmost members of the 
family of Turkish tribes, seem to have been the first among 
them to acquire and use the art of writing: their alphabet 
is said to be mentioned in Chinese annals of the fifth cen- 
tury, and their reputation for learning won them considera- 
tion and high employment even down to the era of the 
Mongolian outbreak ; but they, their civilization, and their 
literature have since passed so nearly out of existence that 
it has even been possible to raise the question whether they 
were, In fact, of Turkish kindred and speech. Very scanty 
fragments of what are supposed to have been their literary 
productions, of uncertain age, are still preserved to us. The 
general conversion of the Turkish tribes to Mohammedan- 
ism led to the crowding out of their ancient alphabet by the 
Arabic. From the south-eastern division of the same 
branch, generally called the Jagataic, or Oriental Turkish, 
we have a literature of some value, dating from the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries, but not continued later: its most 
important work is the autobiography of the emperor Baber, 
that extraordinary man who early in the sixteenth century 
conquered India, founding there the Mogul dynasty, the final 


314 SCYTHIAN LITERATURES. [LEOT, 


extinction of which we have ourselves witnessed within the 
past few years. The westernmost Turkish race, the con- 
querors of Constantinople, usually known by the distinctive 
name of Osmanlis, or Ottomans (both words are corruptions 
of the name of their leader, Othman), have a very rich and 
abundant literature, covering the whole period from the rise 
of the race to power in the fourteenth century down to our 
own time. It is, however, of only secondary interest, as 
being founded on Persian and Arabic models, and containing 
little that is distinctively national in style and spirit. The 
learned dialect, too, in which it is written, is crowded full of 
Persian and Arabie words, often to the nearly total exclusion — 
of native Turkish material. In the Finno-Hungarian branch 
of the family, finally, there is the same paucity of literary 
records. In Hungary, after its conversion to Roman Chris- 
tianity (about a.p. 1000), Latin was for a long time the 
almost exclusive medium of learned communication and com- 
position. The Reformation, in the sixteenth century, favoured 
the uprising-of a national literature, in the vernacular 
tongue; but Austrian policy checked and thwarted its de- 
velopment ; and a renewed start, taken about the beginning 
of the present century, was baffled when the remains of 
Hungarian liberty were trampled out in 1849. Finnish 
written literature is still more recent, but boasts at least one 
work of a high ‘order of interest, of a wholly native and 
original stamp: the Kalevala, composed of half-mythical, 
half-legendary songs, which have been handed down by tra- 
dition, apparently for many centuries, from generation to 
generation of the Finnish people. No other Ugrian race 
possesses a lrterature. 

It is claimed of late, however, by those who are engaged 
in constructing linguistic, ethnological, and political history 
out of the just disentombed records of Assyrian culture and 
art, that sufficient evidence is found to compel the belief 
that neither Indo-Europeans nor Semites, but some third 
race, were the first occupants and owners of the soil, and laid 
the foundation of the culture which was adopted and devel- 
oped there by the other races, as they later, one after 
another, succeeded to the supremacy; and some maintain 


vill. | UNITY OF SCYTHIAN FAMILY. 315 


further that the language of this race shows it to have been 
Scythian, amember of the westernmost, or Finno-Hungarian, 
branch of the family. By others the Scythian character of 
the dialect is explicitly denied. The discussion is at present 
in the hands of too few persons, and those too little versed 
in Scythian philology, to admit of a definite and satisfactory 
conclusion ; and meanwhile we are justified in regarding 
with extreme incredulity any theory which puts Scythian 
races in the position of originators of an independent civiliz- 
ation, and teachers of Semites and Indo-Europeans. Such 
a position is wholly inconsistent with what is known of their 
history elsewhere, and would constitute a real anomaly in 
ethnology ; while we are not authorized utterly to deny its 
possibility, we certainly have the right to demand full and 
unequivocal evidence before we yield it our belief. The 
fact—if fact it be—is of a revolutionary character, and must 
fight its way to acknowledgment. 

The linguistic tie, now, which binds together the widely 
scattered branches of this great family, is a somewhat loose 
and feeble one, consisting less in the traceable correspond. 
ence of material and forms, the possession of the same roots 
and the same inflections, than in a correspondence of the 
style of structure, of the modes of apprehension and expres- 
sion of grammatical relations. Each great branch forms by 
itself a group as distinct as is, for instance, the Germanie or 
the Slavonic in our own family ; but there is no such palpa- 
ble and unmistakable evidence of kinship between Ugrian, 
Turkish, Mongol, and Manchu, as between German, Russian, 
- Greek, and Sanskrit. It is, to no small extent, those who 
know least in detail respecting the languages of the family 
who are most ready to assert and defend their historical 
connection: and, on the other hand, Castrén, himself a 
Jinn, and whose long and devoted labours have taught us 
more respecting them than has been brought to light by 
any other man, ventures* to assert with confidence only the 
demonstrable linguistic relationship of Ugrian, Samoyed, 
and Turkish, and regards the inclusion of Mongol and Man- 


* Ethnological Lectures respecting the Altaic Races (St Petersburg, 
1857), p. 94. 


316 AGGLUTINATIVE CHARACTER [LECt 


chu within the same circle as still questionable. But even 
between the three former, the material evidence is but weak 
and scanty, as compared with that presented in the Indo- 
European idioms, of which specimens were given above, in 
the fifth lecture; no investigator has ever been able to 
draw up tables of pervading correspondences in the Scy- 
thian tongues, which should at once illustrate and prove 
their genetic unity. It is possible, of course, that the races 
who speak these tongues may have been separated longer 
than the Indo-European, enough longer for a more sweeping 
effacement of the evidence of their common descent; or, 
again, that the lack of those remains of dialects of great 
antiquity which so aid our researches into the history of our 
own family of speech is what prevents our recognition of the 
links that bind the Scythian languages into one. Jt may be, 
too, that these have possessed as much more variable and 
mobile a character than the Indo-European forms of speech 
as the latter than the Semitic: this, indeed, has been repeat- 
edly assumed to be true, and even defended by theoretical 
and @ priori arguments ; but 1 am not aware that it has ever 
been established by proper linguistic evidence and reasoning, 
and it is strongly opposed by the coherence of the several 
branches, and the near accordance of the dialects composing 
them. And, were either or both of these possible explana- 
tions of the discordances of the Scythian tongues proved 
true, they would by no means settle the question in favour 
of the unity of the family ; they would simply forbid us to 
maintain too dogmatically that the tongues were not and could 
not be related as members of one family ; before consenting 
positively to regard them as thus related, we should still be 
entitled to demand tangible evidences; if not correspond- 
ences of material, then at least definite and distinctive cor- 
respondences of form. And, as already intimated, a mor- 
phological resemblance is the ground on which the claim 
of Scythian unity is chiefly founded; their fundamental 
common characteristic is that they follow what is styled an 
agglutinative type of structure. That is to say, the elements 
out of which their words are formed are loosely put together, 
instead of being closely compacted, or fused into me; they 


vul. | OF SCYTHIAN LANGUAGES. 317 


are ageregated, rather than integrated ; the root or theme is 
held apart from the affixes, and these from one another, with 
a distinct apprehension of their separate individuality. As 
Professor Miller well expresses it, while Indo-Eurcpean 
language, in putting two roots together to compose a form, 
sinks the individuality of both, the Scythian sinks that of 
but one, the suffix. The process is not, in its first stages, 
diverse in the two families, since every Indo-European form 
began with being a mere collocation, and, in a large propor- 
tion of cases, the root maintains to the end its integrity of 
form and meaning: the difference is one of degree rather 
than of kind; of the extension and effect, rather than the 
essential nature, of a mode of formation: and yet, it is a 
palpable and an important difference, when we compare the 
general structure of two languages, one out of each family. 

The simple possession in common of an agglutinative cha- 
racter, as thus defined, would certainly be a very insufficient 
indication of the common parentage of the Scythian tongues ; 
mere absence of inflection would be a characteristic far too 
general and indeterminate to prove anything respecting 
them. They do, however, present some striking points of 
agreement in the style and manner of their agglutination, 
such as might supplement and powerfully aid the convincing 
force of a body of material correspondences which should be 
found wanting in desired fullness. The most important of 
these structural accordances are as follows. 

In the Scythian languages, derivation by prefixes is un- 
known ; the radical syllable always stands at the head of the 
word, followed by the formative elements. The root, too, to 
whatever extent it may receive the accretion of suffixes, 
itself remains pure and unchanged, neither fused with them, 
nor euphonically affected by them: throughout the whole 
body of its derivatives, it has one unvarying and easily re 
cognized form. It would appear, however, on theoretical 
grounds, that this fundamental characteristic, of the inviolas 
bility of the Scythian roots, must be admitted with some 
grains of allowance : since, if root be kept absolutely sepa. 
rate from ending, and changeless, we should, on the one 
hand, look for a much closer coincidence of roots than we 


318 CHARACTERISTICS OF [LECT 


actually find between the different dialects ; and, on the other 
hand, the grand means of development of new words and 
roots would be cut off, and linguistic growth almost stifled. 
While, then, in general the root receives no modification. 
from the endings, the latter, on the contrary, are modified 
by the root, in a way which constitutes the most striking 
phonetic peculiarity of the family. The vowels, namely, are 
divided into two classes, heavy (a, 0, w, etc.), and light (e, 2, 
ii, etc.), or guttural and palatal ; and, in the suffixes, only 
vowels of the saine class with that of the root, or with that 
of the last syllable of the root, if there be more than one, 
are allowed to occur. Hence, every suffix has two forms, 
one with light vowel and one with heavy, either of which is 
used, as circumstances may require. Thus, in Turkish, from 
baba, ‘father,’ comes baba-lar-wm-dan, ‘from our fathers,’ 
with heavy vowels ; but from dedeh, ‘ grandfather,’ with light 
vowels, comes dede-ler-in-den, ‘from their grandfathers’ ; 
al, ‘to take,’ makes almak, alma, alaak, while sev, ‘ to luve,’ 
makes sevmek, sevme, sevejek : or, in Hungarian, yuh-asz-nak 
means ‘to the shepherd,’ but kert-esz-nek, ‘ to the gardener.’ 
This is usually called the “law of harmonic sequence of 
vyowels:” it takes somewhat different forms in the different 
branches, and exhibits niceties and intricacies of harmonic 
equipoise into which it is unnecessary here to enter: it 18 
most elaborately developed and most strictly obeyed in the 
Turkish dialects. 

One or two important general characteristics of the lan- 
guages of the family are the natural and direct results of 
this agglutinative method, which attributes to each suflix a 
distinct form and office, and in which a true feeling for the 
unity of words does not forbid an excessive accumulation of 
separate formative elements in the same vocable. In the 
first place, varieties and irregularities of conjugation and de- 
elension are almost unknown in Scythian grammar: all 
verbs, all nouns, are inflected upon the same unvarying 
model; every grammatical relation has its own sign, by 
which it is under all circumstances denoted. In the second 
place, a host of more or less complicated forms are derivable 
by in4ectional processes from one root or theme An 


FIII. | SCYTHIAN LANGUAGE. 319 


instance is the word baba-lar-um-dan, given above, which 
contains the possessive wm, signifying ‘our,’ besides the 
plural ending Jar and the ablative case-affix dan. The 
Turkish verbs exemplify the same peculiarity in a much 
more striking manner: thus, by appending to the root one 
or more than one of half-a-dozen modifying elements, ex- 
pressing passivity, reflexiveness, reciprocity, causation, nega- 
tion, and impossibility, we may form an almost indefinite 
number of themes of conjugation, each possessing the com- 
plete scheme of temporal and modal forms: examples are, 
from the root sev, ‘love,’ sev-ish-dir-mek, ‘to cause to love 
one another,’ sev-ish-dir-il-eme-mek, ‘not to be capable of 
being made to love one another,’ and go on. 

Of the more ordinary inflectional apparatus, analogous 
with that of the tongues of our own family, some of the 
Scythian languages possess an abundant store: the Finnish 
has a regular scheme of fifteen cases for its nouns; the 
Hungarian, one of more than twenty. Their plurals are 
formed by a separate pluralizing suffix (in Turkish, ler or 
lar, as seen above), to which then the same case-endings are 
added as to the simple theme in the singular. No dis- 
tinction of grammatical gender is marked. Verbal forms are 
produced, as with us, by personal endings, of pronominal 
origin. These are of two kinds, personal and possessive, 
and are appended respectively to conjugational themes having 
a participial and an infinitival significance, to names of the 
actor and of the action. Thus, from Turkish dog-mak, 
‘to strike,’ through the present participle dogur, ‘ striking,’ 
comes the present dogur-uwm, ‘striking-I,’ ie., ‘I strike ;’ 
the preterit is dogd-wm, ‘ act-of-striking-mine,’ i.e., ‘I have 
struck ;’ the third person is the simple theme, without suffix, 
as dogur, ‘ he strikes,’ dogdi, ‘he has struck ;’ and the addi- 
~ tion to these of the common plural suffix of declension 
mekes the third persons plural, dogur-lar, ‘they strike,’ 
dogdi-ler, ‘they have struck’—literally, ‘strikers,’ ‘ strikings.’ 
Such verbal forms are, then, essentially nouns, taken in a 
predicative sense; the radical idea has been made a noun of, 
in order to be employed as a verb; and so much of the 
nouunal form and character still cleaves to them, that it must 


320 SCYTHIAN LANGUAGES, [LECT, 


be conceded that the Scythian tongues have not clearly 
apprehended and fully worked out the distinction of these 
two fundamental parts of speech. Their conjugation, how- 
ever, such as it is,is rich in temporal and modal distinctions. 
The root appears in its naked form as second person singular 
imperative. 

Connectives and relational words are nearly unknown in 
the languages of this family. Where we should employ a 
clause, they set a case-form of a noun: for example, “while 
we were going” is rendered in Turkish by gtt-diy-imiz-de, 
‘in our act of going (wenting).’ By means of gerundives 
and possessives, the different members of a period are twined 
together into a single intricate or lumbering statement, 
having the principal verb regularly at the end, and the deter- 
mining word followed by the determined, often producing an 
jnverted construction which seems very strange to our appre- 
hension. 

It must not fail to be observed that the different branches 
of this family are not a little discordant as regards the degree 
of their agglutinative development. The Ugrian dialects, 
especially the Hungarian and Finnish, are the highest in 
rank, being almost entitled to be reckoned as inflective. 
The eastern branches, the Mongolian and Tungusian, are in 
every way poorer and scantier, and the Manchu even verges 
upon monosyllabic stiffness, not having, for example, so much 
as a distinction of number and person in its predicative or 
verbally employed words. The Turkish, in rank as in 
geographical position, holds a middle place. 

Whether the morphological correspondences thus set 
forth, along with others less conspicuous, which have been 
found to exist between Ugrian, Samoyed, Turkish, Mongol, 
and Tungusic languages, are of themselves sufficient to prove 
these languages genetically allied, branches of one original 
stock, may be regarded as still an open question, A wider 
induction, a more thorough grasp and comprehension of the 
resemblances and differences of all human speech, is prob- 
ably needed ere linguistic science shall be justified in 
pronouncing a confident decision of a question so recondite. 

‘hether, again, coincidences in the actual material of the 


VIIt. | THEIR CONNECTION DOUBTFUL. 21 


oo 


same tongues have been brought out in sufficient number, or 
of a sufficiently unequivocal character, to constitute, along 
with these correspondences of form, such an argument iv 
favour of the unity of the family as may be deemed satis- 
factory and accepted, is also a matter for doubt. It is safest 
to regard the classification at present as a provisional one, 
and to leave to future researches its establishment or its 
overthrow. The separate investigation and mutual com- 
parison of many of the dialects is as yet only very imper- 
fectly made, or even hardly commenced: farther and more 
penetrating study may strengthen and render indissoluble the 
tie that is already claimed to bind together the eastern and 
western branches; but it may also’shew their connection to 
be merely imaginary. 


822 


LECTURE IX. 


Uncertainties of genetic classification of languages. “ Turanian” 
family. Dravidian group. North-eastern Asiatic. | Monosyllabie 
tongues: Chinese, Farther Indian, Tibetan, etc. Malay-Polynesian 
and Melanesian families. Egyptian language and its asserted kin- 
dred ; Hamitic family. Languages of southern and central Africa. 
Languages of America; problem of derivation of American races. 
Isolated tongues: Basque, Caucasian, etc. 


Ix the last lecture, we began a survey of the general 
dividing lines of human speech, an enumeration and deserip- 
tion of the families into which linguistic science has com- . 
bined the languages thus far brought under her notice. We 
had time, however, to examine but two of these families, 
comprehending the tongues of the two great white races 
which have taken or are taking, after our own, the most 
conspicuous parts in the history of mankind: they were, on 
the one hand, the Semitic, a little group of closely related 
dialects in the south-western corner of Asia, counting as its 
principal members the Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac; and, on 
the other hand, the Scythian, an immense aggregation of 
greatly varying forms of speech, occupying with its five 
principal branches—the Ugrian, Samoyedic, Turkish, Mon- 
golian, and Tungusic—a very large, but, in part, a not very 
valuable, portion of the combined continent of Asia and 
Europe. We have now to complete our work by passing in 
cursory review the remaining families. The task may be 
found, as I cannot help fearing, a somewhat tedious one-— 
consisting, as it must do, to no small extent, in going over a 


IX. | - OLASSIFICATION UNCERTAIN. 323 


catalogue of unknown or unfamiliar names, belonging to 
races and tongues that stand far off from our interests ; but, 
if its result shall be to give us a comprehensive view of the 
grand outlines, gevgraphical and structural, of human speech, 
our hour will not have been spent unprofitably. 

It must be borne in mind trom the outset that the best 
classification of human languages now attainable is neither 
exhaustive, nor equally certain and reliable in all its parts. 
While nearly the whole field has been explored, it has not 
been explored everywhere with equal minuteness and care, 
nor by equally trustworthy investigators. In language, as in 
geography, there are few extensive regions which need any 
longer be marked “unknown;” yet there are many of 
which only the most general features have been determined : 
and that, perhaps, in part by inference, in part upon inform- 
ation which may turn out incorrect. It may be said in 
general that, where travellers’ reports, or mere vocabularies, 
have alone been accessible as the ground of classification, the 
results reached are of superficial character and provisional 
value. No family of languages can have either its internal 
or its external relations well established, until its material 
has been submitted to analysis, the genesis and mode of con- 
struction of its forms traced out, and its laws of phonetic 
change deduced from an examination and comparison of all 
the accessible phenomena—until, in short, its vital processes 
are comprehended, in their past history and their present 
workings. To accomplish this for all existing and recorded 
human speech will be a slow and laborious task; and, for a 
long time to come, we must expect that the limits of families 
will be more or less altered, that languages now separated will 
come to be classed together, and even that some of those now 
connected will be sundered. It is not alone true that pene- 
trating study often brings to light resemblances between two 
languages which escape a superficial examination ; it also 
sometimes showsthe illusiveness of others which at first sight 
appeared to be valid evidences of relationship. In a pre- 
liminary comparison, chance coincidences are liable to be 
overvalued. Moreover, the first tentative groupings are 


wont to be made by the more sanguine and enterprising class 
a1 


B24 THE SO-CALLED [LECT. 


of philologists. The ‘personal equation,” as the astro- 
nomers call it, the allowance for difference of temperament, 
endowment, and skill, has to be applied, certainly not less 
rigorously, in estimating the observations and deductions of 
linguistic scholars than those of the labourers in other 
sciences. There is, on the one hand, the class of facile and 
anticipative investigators, whose minds are most impressed 
by apparent resemblances; who delight in construction, in 
establishing connections, in grouping together extensive 
classes, in forming grand and striking hypotheses; who are 
never willing to say “I do not know:” and, on the other 
hand, there is the class of less ardent and more phlegmatic 
students, who look beneath superficial resemblances to pro- 
founder differences; who call always for more proof; who 
are ever ready to confess ignorance, and to hold their judg- 
ment in suspense; who refuse their assent to engaging 
theories, allowing it to be wrung from them only by cogent 
and convincing evidence. Each class has its advantages: 
the one furnishes the better explorers, the other the sounder 
critics; the one is the more numerous and the more popular, 
the other is the safer and the more strictly scientific. 

A notable exemplification of this temperamental difference 
of authorities is furnished us in connection with one of the 
families of which we have already treated. We saw reason, 
in the last lecture, to regard with some doubt the genetic 
relationship claimed to exist between the five great branches 
of the Scythian family, as being founded too little on actual 
correspondence of linguistic materials demonstrably derived 
from a common source, and too much on mere analogies of 
linguistic structure—analogies, too, which were able to con- 
sist with such important differences as separate the jeyune” 
dialect of the Manchus from the rich and almost inflective 
languages of the Finns and Hungarians. We could not 
pronounce it certain that the family will be able to maintain 
its integrity in the light of a more thorough and comprehen- 
sive investigation. But, on the other hand, we were unable 
to deny that it may succeed in doing so; and farther, it 
is altogether possible that recognizable evidences of ultimate 


1x. ] “TURANIAN ” FAMILY. 325 


connection with the family may be found among other Asi- 
atic tongues, as yet unclassed. Now some linguistic scholars, 
of no little note and authority, have ventured to give to 
these possibilities the value of established and unquestion- 
able facts. They have set up an enormous family, which they 
have styled the “ Turanian;” they have allotted to it the 
agglutinative structure as its distinctive characteristic, and 
have made it include nearly all known tongues save the Indo- 
European and Semitic, not in Asia alone, but through the 
oceanic islands and over the continent of America. Such 
sweeping and wholesale conglomeration (for we can hardly 
call it classification), at the present stage of progress of lin- 
guistic research, is wholly unscientific, and of no authority 
or value. It represents only a want of detailed knowledge, 
and a readiness to give way to loose and unscrupulous theoriz- 
ing, on the part of its authors, who are, at the very best, 
anticipators of the result of scientific inquiry —who are 
even already proved in part its contradictors: for it is long 
since shown that many of the alleged “ Turanian ” dialects 
are hardly less fundamentally different in their structure 
from the typical languages of the family than is the Greek 
or the Hebrew. That the inventors of the name Turanian 
have associated it with such a baseless classification is suffi- 
cient reason why it should be strictly rejected from the 
terminology of linguistic science. Nor has it in virtue of 
its derivation any peculiar claim to our acceptance. It is 
borrowed from the legendary history of the Persian or 
Iranian -race, as represented to us chiefly by the Shah- 
Nameh, or ‘Book of Kings,’ of Firdusi. There Irej and 
Tur are two of the three brothers from whom spring the 
races of mankind; and the tribes of Iran and Turan, their 
descendants—namely, the native Persians and their neigh- 
bours upon the north-east, probably of Turkish kindred— 
are represented as engaged in incessant warfare upon the 
frontier of their respective territory. Why we should adopt 
a term so local in its original application, out of a cycle of 
legends with which so few of us are familiar, as the name of 
a race which is claimed to extend from the xorth-western 


326 DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGES. [ LEC, 


border of Europe eastward across continent and ocean, wid2n- 
ing as it goes, till it spreads along the whole western Atlan- 
tic shore, cannot easily be made to appear. 

There are especially two groups of Asiatic languages, 
which have been confidently claimed, and with some show of 
reason, to belong to the Scythian family. Of these, the first 
is that occupying the southern portion of the peninsula of 
India, and commonly called the Tamulian or Dravidian 
group or family. We have already seen (in the fifth and 
sixth lectures) that the Sanskrit speaking tribes, of Indo- 
European race, forced their way into India through the 
passes on its north-western frontier, almost within the his- 
toric period ; and that they there took exclusive possession 
only of the northern portion of the country, including espe- 
cially the vast plains and valleys of Hindustan proper, with 
a tract of the sea-coast stretching southward on either hand ; 
dispossessing so far, by reduction to servitude or by expul- 
sion, the more aboriginal inhabitants, but leaving to their 
former owners the hilly and elevated southern region, the 
Dekhan, as well as the yet less accessible heights and slopes 
of the Himalaya chain in the north. Throughout nearly the 
whole Dekhan, these older races still form the predominant 
population, and speak and write their own languages. Chief 
among the latter are the Tamil, occupying the south-eastern 
extremity of the peninsula, along with most of the island of 
Ceylon; the Telinga or Telugu, spoken over a yet more 
extensive region lying north of this; the Canarese, extend- 
ing from the interior border of the Tamil and Telugu west- 
ward almost to the coast ; the Malayalam or Malabar, cover- 
ing a narrow strip of the south-western coast, from Cape 
Comorin northwards; and the Tulu, filling a still more 
restricted area to the north of the Malayalam. All these 
are cultivated tongues, and possess written literatures, of 
greater or less extent and antiquity ; that of the Tamil is 
the most important and the oldest, parts of it appearing to 
date back as far as to the eighth or ninth century of our 
era; nothing in Telugu is dar ber than the twelfth. The 
yay idian races, eae have derived their religion, their 
polity, and their culture, from the superior race to the north 


1x. DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGES. 327 


of them, the Hindus ; their alphabets are of Hindu descent ; 
their philosophical and scientific terms are borrowed from 
the rich stores of the Sanskrit ; their literary works are in 
no small part translations or imitations of Sanskrit authors. 
There are other tribes in the peninsula, of less numbers ané 
importance, wholly uncultivated, and in part of savage man- 
ners and mode of life. Some of these—as the Tudas of the 
Nilagiri hills, the Kotas of the same neighbourhood, and 
the wild Gonds and Khonds of the hilly country of Gond- 
wana—are proved by their language to be akin with the 
Dravidian peoples ; * others—as the Kols, Suras, and Santals 
-—appear to be of entirely diverse race and speech; relics, 
perhaps, of a yet more ancient Indian population, which 
occupied the soil before the incursion of the Dravidians, and 
was driven out by these, as they, in their turn, by the Indo- 
Europeans. Once more, outside the borders of India 
proper, in the neighbouring country of Beluchistan (the 
ancient Gedrosia), there is found a people, the Brahuis, 
whose tongue, though filled with words of Hindu origin, is 
claimed to exhibit unequivocal traces of a Dravidian basis. 
The Dravidian languages are not only, like the Scythian, 
of a generally agglutinate character, but their style of ag- 
glutinative structure is sufficiently accordant with that of 
the Scythian tongues to permit of their being ranked’ in 
the same family, provided that material evidence of the 
relationship, of a sufficiently distinct and unequivocal char- 
acter, shall also be discovered. That such has been already 
found out and set forth, is not to be believed. The investi- 
gation has not yet been undertaken by any scholar pro- 
foundly versed in the languages of both families, nor has 
the comparative grammar of the Scythian dialects reached 
results which can be applied in conducting it and in arriving 
at a determinate decision. That an outlying branch of tke 
Scythian race once stretched down through western and 
southern Iran into the Indian peninsula is at present only an 
attractive and plausible theory, which may yet be established 


* This is the opinion of Caldwell, from whose excellent Comparative 
Grammar of the Dravidian Languages (London, 1856) are mainly derived 
the materials for this account of the family. 


$28 LANGUAGES OF JAPAN [ LECT. 


by comparison of languages, when this comparisun shall have 
been made with sufficient knowledge and sufficient caution. 

The other group referred to, as having been sometimes 
claimed to exhibit traces of relationship with the Scythian 
family, is composed of the languages which. occupy the 
peninsulas and islands of the extreme north-eastern part of 
the Asiatic continent. Their character and relations con- 
stitute a very obscure and difficult problem in linguistic 
ethnology : whether they make up a group in any other thar 
a geographical sense, whether they are not isolated and inde- 
pendent tongues, is at present exceedingly doubtful. Their 
linguistic tie, if there be one, is yet to be established. 

By far the most conspicuous and important member of the 
group is the Japanese. Itis wholly confined to the islands 
forming the empire of Japan (and into the northernmost of 
these, Yesso, it is a recent intrusion ; the chief population 
of the island is Kurilian), and has no representatives or near 
kindred upon the main-land. So lively attention has been 
directed to it of late, since the re-opening of the empire to 
Europeans—its grammars, dictionaries, conversation-books, 
and the like, are multiplying so rapidly in European lan- 
guages, and are leading to so much discussion of its linguistic 
character, that we may hope to see its position ere long 
definitely established. It has recently been repeatedly and 
confidently asserted to be “of the Turanian family ;” but 
this is a phrase of so wholly dubious meaning that we cannot 
tell what it is worth: we shall be obliged to hold our judg- 
ments suspended until the general relations of the north- 
eastern Asiatic languages are better settled. The language 
is polysyllabic and agglutinative in character, possessing 
some of the features of construction which also characterize 
the Scythian tongues. It is of a simple phonetic structure 
(its syllables being almost always composed of a single con- 
sonant with following vowel), and fluent and easy of utter- 
ance. Besides the ordinary spoken dialect, there is another, 
older and more primitive, used as the medium of certain 
styles of composition: itis called the Yamato. Much, too, 
of the learned literature of the Japanese is written in 
Chinese. Their culture and letters come from China, being 


rx ] AND NORTH-EASTERN ASIA. 329 


introduced, it is believed, m the third century of our era: 
the annals of the empire, however, claim to go back toa 
much higher antiquity, even to a time some centuries before 
Christ. It was unfortunate for an inflected tongue like the 
Japanese to be obliged to resort to China for an alphabet ; 
and although a thoroughly practical and convenient set of 
characters, of syllabic value, easy to write and to read, was 
at one time devised, being made out of parts of Chinese 
ideographs, it is of very restricted use; and the mode of 
writing generally employed for literary texts is one of the 
most detestable in the world, and the greatest existing ob- 
stacle to the acquirement of the language. 

The dialect of the Loo-Choo islands is nearly akin with the 
Japanese. | 

The peninsula of Corea, lying im close proximity to 
the empire of Japan, is occupied by a language between 
which and the Japanese, though they are not so dissimilar m 
structure that they might not be members of one family, no 
material evidences of relationship have been traced and 
pointed out. The Corean also possesses some literary culti- 
yation, derived from China; but of both language and liter- 
ature only the scantiest knowledge has reached the West. 

Along the coast of Asia north of Corea, and also upon the 
island of Saghalien or Karafto, and through the Kurile chain 
of islands, which stretch from Yesso northward to the ex- 
tremity of the peninsula of Kamchatka, dwells another race, 
that of tee Ainos or Kurilians. They are hairy savages, 
who live by hunting and fishing, but are distinguished by 
nobility of bearing and gentleness of manners, Their speech 
has been sometimes pronounced radically akin with the 
Japanese, but, apparently, without any sufficient reason. A 
few of their popular songs have been written down by 
strangers. . 

The peninsula of Kamchatka itself belongs to yet another 
wild race, the Kamchadales ; and to the north of these lie the 
nearly related peoples of the Koriaks and Chukchi, between 
whom and the American races a connection has been sus- 
pected, but not satisfactorily proved. The Namollos, who 
occupy the very extremity of the continent, next to Beh- 


830 MONOSYLLABIC LANGUAGES [LECT, 


rino’s straits, are pretty certainly related with the Eskimes 
of the northern shores of the opposite continent, and thus 
appear to be emigrants out of America into Asia. 

Between the races we have mentioned and the Yakuts of 
the Lena, that far outlying branch of the Turkish family, 
finally, live the Yukagiris, another isolated and widely spread 
people, not proved by their language to be akin with any of 
their neighbours. 

It was the more necessary to glance at the intricate and 
ill understood linguistic relations of this part of the Asiatic 
continent, because our eyes naturally turn curiously in that 
direction, when we inquire whence and how our own Ameri- 
can continent obtained the aboriginal population which we 
have been dispossessing. ‘It is evident that much remains 
to be dore upon the Asiatic side of the straits before the 
linguistic scholar can be ready for a comparison which shall 
show with what race of the Old World, if with any, the 
races of the New are allied in speech. 

The south-eastern portion of Asia is occupied by peoples 
whose tongues form together a single class or family. They 
fill China and Farther India, and some of the neighbouring 
parts of the central Asiatic plateau. The distinctive common 
characteristic of these tongues is that they are monosyllabie. 
Of all human dialects, they represent most nearly what, as 
y7e have already seen reason for concluding, was the primitive 
stage of the aggittinative and inflective forms of speech ; 
they have never begun that fusion of elements once independ- 
ently significant into compound forms which has been the 
principal item in the history of development of all other 
tongues. The Chinese words, for example, are still to no 
small extent roots, representing ideas in crude and undefined 
form, and equally convertible by use into noun, verb, or 
adverb. Thus, ¢a contains the radical idea of ‘being great,’ 
and may, as a substantive, mean ‘ greatness ;’ as an adjective, 
‘oreat ;’ as a verb, either ‘ to be great,’ or ‘to make great, 
to magnify ;’ as an adverb, ‘ greatly :’ the value which it is 
to have as actually employed, in any given case, is deter- 
mined partly by its position in the phrase, and partly by the 
requirements of the sense, as gathered from the complex of 


Ix. | OF SOUTH-EASTERN ASIA. 331 


ideas which the sentence presents. We have already had 
occasion to remark (in the seventh lecture) that somewhat 
the same thing may be said of many English words; we 
took love as an instance of one which is now either verb or 
noun, having lost by phonetic abbreviation the formative 
elements which once distinguished it as the one and as the 
other. Itis avery customary thing with us, too, to take 
a word which is properly one part of speech, and con. 
vert it into various others without changing its shape: 
for example, better is primarily an adjective, as in “a better 
man than 1;” but we employ it in connections which 
make of it an adverb, as in “he loves party better than 
country ;” or a noun, as when we speak of yielding to our 
betters, or getting the better of a bad habit; or, finally, a 
verb, as in “they better their condition.” Such analogies, 
however, do not explain the form and the variety of applica- 
tion of the words composing the Chinese and its kindred 
languages. Of the former possession of formative elements 
these words show no signs, either phonetic or significant ; 
they have never been made distinct parts of speech in the 
sense In which ours have been and are so. How different 
is the state of monosyllabism which precedes inflection from 
that which follows it in consequence of the wearing off of 
inflective elements, may be in some measure seen by com- 
paring a Chinese sentence with its English equivalent. The 
Chinese runs, as nearly as we can represent it, thus: “ King 
speak: Sage! not far thousand mile and come; also will 
have use gain me realm, hey?” which means, ‘the king 
spoke: O sage! since thou dost not count a thousand miles 
far to come (that is, hast taken the pains to come hither 
from a great distance), wilt thou not, too, have brought some 
thing for the weal of my realm ?’* 

While all the languages of the region we have described 
thus agree in type, in morphological character, they show a 
great and astonishing diversity of material ; only scanty cor- 
respondences of form and meaning are found in their vocabu- 
laries; and hence, the nature and degree of their mutual 


* This example is taken from Schleicher’s Languages of Kurope in 
Systematic Review (Bonn, 1850), p. 41. 


332 CHINESE LANGUAGE AND [ LECT, 


relationship are still obscure. But the structural accordance 
is here, evidently, a pretty sure sign of common descent, 
If monosyllabic tongues were of frequent occurrence among 
human races, if, for instance, we met with one group of them 
in China, another in Africa, and another in America, we 
should have no right to infer that they were all genetically 
related ; for it is, beyond all question, hypothetically possible 
that different divisions of mankind should be characterized 
by a kindred inaptitude for linguistic development. When, 
however, we find the known languages of this type clustered 
together in one corner of a single continent, we cannot well 
resist the conviction that they are all dialects of one original 
tongue, and that their differences, however great these may 
be, are the resuit of discordant historic growth. 

Infinitely the most important member of the monosyllabie 
group or family is the Chinese: its history is exceeded in 
interest by that of very few other known tongues. Its 
earliest literary records (some of the odes of the Shi-King, 
‘Book of Songs’) claim to go back to nearly two thousand 
years before Christ, and the annals and traditions of the 
race reach some centuries farther, so that Chinese antiquity 
almost exceeds in hoariness both Semitic and Indo-European. 
China, indeed, in the primitiveness and persistency of its 
language, its arts, and its polity, is one of the most remark- 
able and exceptional phenomena which the story of our race 
presents. It has maintained substantially the same speech 
and the same institutions, by uninterrupted transmission 
from generation to generation upon the same soil, all the 
way down to our own times from a period in the past at 
which every Indo-European people of which we know aught 
was but a roving tribe of barbarians. Elsewhere, change has 
been the dominating principle; in China, permanency. Nor 
has this permanency been quietism and stagnation. China has 
1ad, down even to modern times, no insignificant share of 
activity and progress, though always within certain limits, 
and never of a radical and revolutionary character. She has 
been one of tne very few great centres of culture and en- 
ligchtenment which the world has known; and her culture 
has been not less original in its beginnings, and almost more 


Ix. ] CHINESE LITERATURE. 333 


independent of foreign aid in its development, than any other. 
She has been the mother of arts, sciences, and letters, to the 
races on every side of her; and the world at large she has 
affected not a little, mainly through the material products of 
her ingenuity and industry. Repeatedly subjected to foreign 
domination, she has always vanquished her conquerors, com- 
pelling them implicitly to adopt her civilization, and respect 
and maintain her institutions. That she now at last seems 
to have become in a measure superannuated and effete, and to 
be nearing her downfall, under the combined pressure of 
overcrowded population, a detested foreign yoke and internal 
rebellion against it, and the disorganizing interference of 
Western powers, may be true; but it does not become us to 
regard otherwise than with compassion the final decay of 
a culture which, taking into account the length of its dura- 
tion and the number of individuals affected by it, has perhaps 
spread as much light and made as much happiness as any 
other that ever existed. 

The representative man of China is Confucius, who lived 
in the sixth century before Christ. He is no religious 
teacher, but an ethical and political philosopher. In him 
the wisdom of the olden time, the national apprehension of 
the meaning and duties of life, found its highest expression, 
which has been accepted as authoritative by all succeeding 
ages. He determined how much of the ancient literature 
should be saved from oblivion: his excerpts from it, histori- 
eal and poetical, together with his own writings, and the 
works of his pupils, in which are handed down his own in- 
structions in public and private virtue, form nearly the whole 
of the Five King and the Four Books, the national classics, 
the earliest and most revered portion of the national litera- 
ture. Their continuation and elaboration have engaged no 
insignificant part of the literary activity of following genera- 
tions. But, aside from this, almost every department of 
mental productiveness is represented in China by hosts of 
works, ancient and modern: in history, in biography, in geo- 
graphy and ethnology, in jurisprudence, in the grammar avd 
lexicography especially of their own tongue, in natural his- 
tory and science, in art and industry, in the various branches 


B34 OHARACTER OF THE | LECT. 


of belles-lettres, as poetry, romance, the draina, the Chinese 
have produced in abundance what, tried even by our own 
standard, is worthy of high respect and admiration. No 
race, certainly, outside the Indo-European and Semitic 
families, nor many races even of those families, can show a 
literature of equal value with the Chinese. 

Not very much requires to be said in explanation of the 
structure and history of a language so simple—a language 
which might be said to have no grammatical structure, which 
possesses neither inflections nor parts of speech, and which 
has changed less in four thousand years than most others in 
four hundred, or than many another in a single century. 
So restricted, in the first place, is its phonetical system, that 
its whole vocabulary, in the general cultivated dialect (which 
has lost the power of uttering final mutes, still preserved and 
distinctly sounded in some of the popular patois), is com- 
posed of only about four hundredand fifty different vocablés, 
combinations of sounds: these, however, are converted into 
not far from three times that number of distinct words by 
means of the tones of utterance, which in Chinese, as in 
some other languages of similarly scanty resources, are 
pressed into the service of the vocabulary, instead of being 
left, as with us, to the department of rhetoric and elocution. 
As a necessary consequence, the several words have a much 
greater range of signification than in more richly endowed 
tongues; each seems to unite in itself the offices of many 
distinct words, the tie of connection between its significa- 
tions being no longer traceable. External development, the 
formation of derivative words to bear the variety of derived 
meanings into which every root tends to branch out, is here 
almost or quite unknown: internal, significant development 
has been obliged to do the whole work of linguistic growth. 
Of course, then, not only the grammatical form, but also the 
radical significance, is often left to be pointed out by the con- 
nection, And here, again, the Chinese finds its nearest 
parallel, among inflected tongues, in the numerous homonyms 
(words identical in sound but different in meaning) of our 
own English: for example, in our three different meet’s 
(meet, mete, and meat), and bear’s (bear, verb, bear, noun, 


ES | CHINESE LANGUAGE. 335 


and bare, adjective), and found’s (found from find, found, 
‘establish,’ and found, ‘ cast’), and other the like. In the 
written language, much of this ambiguity is avoided, since 
each Chinese character represents a word with regard, not to 
its phonetic form alone, but to its meaning also * — whence 
comes the strange anomaly that a language composed of but 
a thousand or two of words is written with an alphabet con- 
taining tens of thousands of different signs. The literary style 
is thus enabled to unite with sufficient intelligibility a won- 
derful degree of conciseness, to combine brevity and precision 
to a degree elsewhere unapproached. The spoken language is 
much more wordy, using, to secure the mutual understanding 
of speaker and hearer, various devices, which here and there 
approach very near to agglutination, although they always 
stop short of it. To no small extent, the Chinese is in prac- 
tical use a language of groups of monosyllabic roots rather 
than of isolated monosyllables: a host of conceptions which 
we signify by single words, it denotes by a collocation of 
several words: thus, ‘ virtue’ is represented by four cardinal 
virtues, faith-piety-temperance-justice ; ‘parent’ by father- 
mother ; exceedingly often, two nearly synonymous words are 
put together to express their common meaning, like way-path, 
for ‘way’ (such a collocation being mainly a device for suggest- 
ing to the mind the one signification in which two words, each 
of various meaning, agree with one another) ; very often, again, 
a “ classifier,” or word denoting the class in which a voca- 
ble is used, is appended to it, as when we say maple-tree, 
whale-fish, for maple and whale (many of these classifiers are 
of very peculiar sense and application) ; certain words, 
further, are virtual signs of parts of speech, as those meaning 
‘ get,’ ‘come,’ ‘ go,’ added to verbs; ‘ place,’ making nouns 
from verbs and adjectives; a relative particle, pomting out 
the attributive relation; objective particles, indicating 
an instrumental, locative, dative case; pluralizinge words, 
meaning originally ‘number, crowd, heap ;’ a diminutive 
sien, the word for ‘ child;’ and so on. There has been 
here not a little of that attenuation and integration of 


* See the twelfth lecture, where this peculiarity of the Chinese mode of 
writing will be more fully explained, 


/ 


336 LANGUAGES OF CHINA [ LECT. 


meaning by wh'ch in our own language we have formed 
so many relational words and phrases; but there is no 
fusion, no close combination, even, of elements; these are 
simply placed side by side, without losing their separate m- 
dividuality. There is no reason assignable why a truly ag- 
glutinative stage might not possibly grow out of a condition 
of things like this; and it is claimed by some that, in certain 
of the popular dialects (which differ notably from the kwan- 
hwa, the common dialect of the lettered classes), agglutina- 
tion, to a limited extent, is actually reached. 

While thus the Chinese is, in certain respects of funda- 
mental importance, the most rudimentary and scanty of all 
known languages, the one least fitted to become a satisfactory 
means of expression of human thought, it is not without its 
compensations. The power which the human mind has over 
its instruments, and independent of their imperfections, is 
strikingly illustrated by the history of this form of speech, 
which has successfully answered all the purposes of a culti- 
vated, reflecting, studious, and ingenious people throughout a 
career of unequalled duration; which has been put to far 
higher and more varied uses than most of the multitude of 
highly organized dialects spoken among men—dialects rich 
in flexibility, adaptiveness, and power of expansion, but poor 
in the mental poverty and weakness of those who shouid 
wield them. In the domain of language, as in some depart- 
ments of art and industry, no race has been comparable with 
the Chinese for capacity to. accomplish wonderful things wita 
rude and uncouth instruments. 

The principal nations of Farther India are the Annamese 
or Cochin-Chinese, the Siamese, and the Burmese ; tribes of 
inferior numbers, civilization, and importance are the Kwanto, 
Cambodians, Peguans, Karens, and others. Annamese cul- 
ture is of Chinese origin; the races of Siam and Burmah 
emerge from obscurity as they receive knowledge, letters, 
and religion (Buddhism) together from India. Their lan. 
guages are, like the Chinese, monosyllabic and isolating; but 
they are as much inferior to that tongue in distinctness of 
constructicr and precision of expression as the people that 
speak them have shown themseives to be inferior to the 


1x.] AND FARTHER INDIA. 339 


mhabitants of China in mental activity and reach. Of indi- 
cative words, substitutes for the formative elements of more 
highly developed languages, they make an extended use. 
Such auxiliary and limiting words are in Siamese always put 
before, in Burmese always after, the principal root. 

To the same general class of tongues, yet with sundry 
variations of type, even sometimes appearing to overstep the 
boundary which divides mere collocation from actual agglu- 
tination of elements, are deemed to belong the exceedingly 
numerous and not less discordant dialects which crowd the 
mountain valleys on both sides of the great range of the 
Himalayas, and that part of the plateau of central Asia which 
lies next north of the range. The linguistic student is lost, 
as yet, in the infinity of details presented by these dialects, 
and is unable to classify them satisfactorily. Most of them 
are known only by partial vocabularies, lists of words 
_ gathered by enterprising collectors,* no penetrating investi- 
gation and clear exposition of their structure and laws of 
growth having yet been made. It were useless to detail 
here the names of the wild tribes to which they belong, or 
set forth the groupings which have been provisionally estab- 
lished among them. The only one which possesses any his- 
torical or literary importance is the Tibetan. Tibet was one 
of the early conquests of Buddhism, and has long been a 
chief centre of that religion. It has an immense Buddhist 
literature, in great part translated from the Sanskrit, and 
written in a character derived from that in which the Sans- 
krit is written. Though strictly a monosyllabic language, 
the Tibetan exhibits some very peculiar and problematical 
features—in its written bus now unpronounced prefixes, and 
a kind of inflective internal change appearing in many of its 
words—which are a subject of much controversy among 
comparative philologists. 

With the next great family, the Malay-Polynesian, or 
Oceanic, we shall not need to delay long. Those who speak 
its dialects fill nearly ail the islands from the coasts of Asia 
southward and eastward, from Madagascar to the Saudwich 

* Among these, Rev. N. Brown and Mr, B. H. Hodgson have especially 

distinguished themselres. 


22 


338 POLYNESIAN AND [LROT. 


group and Easter Island, from New Zealand to Formosa. 
‘A. few of those which are found nearest to Farther India 
possess alphabets and scanty literatures, coming chiefly from 
the introduction among them of religion and culture from 
India; but the Malay has adopted the Arabic alphabet. 
Considering how widely they are scattered, there prevails 
among these languages a notable degree of correspondence 
of material as well as of structure, and their coherence as a 
family is unquestionable ; but the work of marking out 
subordinate groups, and determining degrees of relationship, 
is as yet but partially accomplished for them. Missionaries, 
American and English, have played and are playing an im- 
portant part in laying them open to knowledge, as well as 
in introducing knowledge among those who speak them. 
The Polynesian languages, especially those of the eastern 
division, are of simpler phonetic form than any others spoken 
by human races: their alphabets contain not more than ten 
consonants, often as few as seven, and their allowed combin- 
ations of sounds are restricted to open syllables, composed 
of a vowel alone, or of a vowel preceded by a single conso- 
nant; of combined consonants, or final consonants, they 
know nothing. They are polysyllabic, but hardly less desti- 
tute of forms than the monosyllabic tongues. Their roots, 
if we may call them so, or the most primitive elements which 
our imperfect historical analysis enables us to trace, are more 
often dissyllabic, but of indeterminate value as parts of 
speech: they may be employed, without change, as verb, 
substantive, adjective, or even preposition. All inflection is 
wanting: gender, case, number, tense, mode, person, have no 
formal distinctions; pronouns, indicative particles, prepo- 
sitions, and the like, constitute the whole grammar, making 
parts of speech and pointing out their relations. Moreover, 
anything which can properly be styled a verb is possessed by 
none of these languages ; their so-called verbs are really only 
nouns taken predicatively. Thus, to express ‘he has a white 
jacket on,’ the Dayak says literally “ he with-jacket with-white,” 
or “he jackety whitey.” * As a means of development of 
signification, the repetition or reduplication of a root is very 
* Steinthal, Charakteristik etc., page 164. 


ix. ] MELANESIAN LANGUAGES. 339 


frequently resorted to ; prefixes and suffixes, especially the 
former, are also applied to the same purpose. Only the per- 
sonal pronouns have a peculiar kind of variation by number, 
produced by composition and fusion with the numerals: in 
this way are often distinguished not only a singular, dual, and 
plural, but also a tri-al, denoting three: and the numbers 
other than singular of the first person have a double form, 
according as the we is meant to include or to exclude the per- 
son addressed. 

The races to whom belong the dialects we have thus 
characterized are of a brown colour, But these do not 
make up the whole population of the Pacific island-world. 
The groups of little islands lying to the east of New Guinea 
—the New Hebrides, the Solomon’s islands, New Caledonia, 
and others—are inhabited by a black race, having frizzled or 
woolly hair, yet showing no other signs of relationship with 
the natives of Africa. Men of like physical characteristics 
are found to occupy the greater part of New Guinea, and 
more or less of the other islands lying westward, as far as the 
Andaman group, in the Bay of Bengal. They are known by 
Various names, as N egritos, Papuans, Melanesians. Some of 
their languages have been recently brought by missionary 
effort to the knowledge of linguistie scholars, and help to 
prove the race distinct from the Polynesian. In point of 
material, a wide diversity exists among the dialects of the 
different tribes ; they exhibit almost the extreme of linguistic 
discordance ; each little island has its own idiom, unintelli- 
gible to all its neighbours, and sometimes the separate dis- 
tricts of the same islet are unable to communicate together. 
Yet, so far as they have been examined, distinct traces of a 
common origin have been found; and in general plan of 
structure they agree not only among themselves, but also, in 
a marked degree, with the Polynesian tongues, so that they 
are perhaps to be regarded as ultimately coinciding with the 
latter in origin.* 

The aboriginal inhabitants of Australia and of parts of the 
neighbouring islands are by some set down as a distinct 


* See Von der Gabelentz, Die Melanesischen Sprac! en, ete., in vol. viii 
(1861) of the Memoirs of the Saxon Society of Sciences. 
22 * 


840 EGYPTIAN LANGUAGES. [LECT. 


race, the Alforas: our knowledge of their speech is not 
sufficient for us to determine with confidence their linguistic 
position. : 

The rank in the scale of languages generally assigned 
to the ancient Egyptian (with its successor, the modern 
Coptic), its often alleged connection with the Semitic, and the 
antiquity and importance of the culture to which it served as 
instrument, would have justified us in treating 1t next after 
the Indo-European and Semitic ; but it seemed more conve- 
nient to traverse the whole joint continent of Europe and 
Asia, before crossing into Africa. The chronology of 
Egyptian history is still a subject of not a little controversy ; 
but it cannot be reasonably doubted that the very earliest 
written monuments of human thought are found in the valley 
of the Nile, as well as the most ancient and most gigantic 
works of human art. There was wisdom in Egypt, accumu- 
lated and handed down through a long succession of genera- 
tions, for Moses, the founder of the Hebrew state, to become 
learned in; and Herodotus, the “ father of history,” as we 
are accustomed to style him, found Egypt, when he visited 
it, already entered upon its period of dotage and decay. It 
was a strange country: one narrow line of brilliant green 
(but spreading fan-like at its northern extremity), traced by 
the periodical overflow of a single branchless and sourceless 
river through the great desert which sweeps from the Atlantic 
coast to the very border of India; so populous and so fertile 
as to furnish a surplusage of labour, for the execution of 
architectural works of a solidity and grandeur elsewhere 
unknown, and which the absolute dryness of the climate has 
permitted to come down to us in unequalled preservation. 
On these monuments, within and without, the record-loving 
Egyptians depicted and described the events of their national 
and personal history, the course and occupations of their 
daily lives, their offerings, prayers, and praises, the scenes of 
their public worship and of the administration of their state, 
their expeditions and conquests. Their language has thus 
stood for ages plainly written before the eyes of the world, 
inviting readers ; but the key to the characters in which it 
was inscribed, tke sacred hieroglyphics, had been lost a‘most 


1x. | HAMITIC FAMILY. 34] 


since the beginning of the Christian era ; until, in our own 
century, it has been recovered by the zeal and industry of a 
few devoted men, among whose names that of Champollion 
stands foremost. The reconstruction of the ancient 
Egyptian tongue, though by no means complete, is sufficiently 
advanced to allow us to see quite clearly its general cha- 
racter. It was but an older form of the modern Coptie. 
The Coptic has itself gone out of existence within the past 
three or four centuries, extinguished by the Arabic ; but we 
possess a tolerably abundant Christian Coptic literature, 
representing two or three slightly different dialects, written 
in an alphabetic character chiefly adapted from the Greek, 
and dating back to the early centuries of our era. The 
differences are comparatively slight between the old Egyptian 
of the hieroglyphical monuments and the later Coptic, for the 
exceedingly simple structure of the language has saved it from 
the active operation of linguistic change. A transitional 
step, too, between the one and the other is set before us in 
the series of records, mostly in papyrus rolls, which are called 
hieratic and demotic, from the characters in which they are 
written, modified forms of the hieroglyphs, adapted to a more 
popular use: these records come from the last five or six 
centuries preceding our era, and represent, doubtless, the 
popular speech of the period. 

A number of other African dialects are claimed to exhibit 
affinities of material and structure with the language of 
Egypt. They fall* into three groups: the Ethiopian or 
Abyssinian, of which the Galla is at present the most im- 
portant member; the Libyan or Berber, extending over a 
wide region of northern Africa, from Egypt to the Atlantic 
ocean; and the Hottentot, embracing the dialects of the 
degraded tribes of Hottentots and Bushmen at the far 
southern extremity of the continent ; these last’have been but 
recently recognized as showing signs of probable relationship 
with the rest. The family, as thus made up, is styled the 
Hamitic (by a name correlative to Semitic and Japhetic) : 
its constitution and relations, however, are still matters 9f 


* I follow here the classification of Lepsius, given in the second editiox 
his Standard Alphabet (London and Berlin, 1863), at p. 303. 


342 HGYPTIAN AND OTHER [ LECT, 


no little difference of opinion among linguistic scholars, and 
can be fully established only by continued research. 

The Egyptian was a language of the utmost simplicity, or 
even poverty, of grammatical structure. Its roots—which, 
in their condition as made known to us, are prevailingly, 
though not uniformly, monosyllabie—are also its words; 
neither noun nor verb, nor any other part of speech, has a 
characteristic form, or can be traced back to a simpler radi- 
eal element, from which it comes by the addition of a forma- 
tive element. Some roots, as in Chinese, are either verb, 
substantive, or adjective—thus, ankh, ‘ live, life, alive,’ sekha, 
‘write, a writing, writer ’—others are only verbs or only 
nouns. A word used as substantive is generally marked by 
a prefixed article, which is often closely combined with it, 
but yet is nota part of it; it has no declension, the objective 
uses being indicated by prepositions. The personal inflee- 
tion of the verb is made by means of suffixed pronominal 
endings, also loosely attached, and capable of being omitted 
in the third person when a noun is expressed as subject of 
the verb. Mode and tense are, to a certain limited extert, 
signified by prefixed auxiliary words. But these pronominal 
endings, which, when added to the verb, indicate the subject 
(sometimes also the object), have likewise a possessive value, 
when appended to nouns: thus, ran-t is either ‘I name’ or 
‘my name ;” it is literally, doubtless, ‘ naming-mine,’ applied 
in a substantive or a verbal sense according to the require- 
ments of the particular case: that is to say, there is no 
essential distinction formally made between a noun and a 
verb. In the singular number of both articles and pronominal 
suffixes, as also in the pronouns, there is made a separation 
of gender, as masculine or feminine. This is a highly 
important feature in the structure of Hamitic speech, and 
the one which gives it its best claim to the title of form-lan- 
guage. So far as it goes, it puts the tongues of the family 
into one grand class along with the Indo-European and the 
Semitic: these three families alone have made a subjective 
classification of all objects of knowledge and of thought as 
masculine and feminine, and givenit expression in their speech. 
But, by its general character, the Egyptian is far enough 


Ix, | AFRICAN LANGUAGES. 343 


from being entitled to rank with the Indo-European and 
Semitic languages, being, rather, but a single step above the 
Chinese: in many of its constructions it is quite as bald as 
the latter, and sometimes even less clear and free from 
ambiguity. 

The Egyptian pronouns present some striking analogies 
with the Semitic, and from this fact has been drawn by many 
linguistic scholars the confident conclusion that the two 
famihes are ultimately related, the Egyptian being a relic of 
the Semitic as the latter was before its development into tho 
peculiar form which it now wears, and which was described 
in the last lecture. Considering, however, the exceeding 
structural difference between them, and the high improba- 
bility that any genuine correspondences of so special a cha- 
racter should have survived that thorough working-over 
which could alone have made Semitic speech out of anything 
like Egyptian, the conclusion must be pronounced, at the 
least, a venturesome one. Semitic affinities have been not 
less confidently, and with perhaps more show of reason, 
claimed for the Libyan and Abyssinian branches of the so- 
called Hamitic family. Only continued investigation, and 
more definite establishment of the criteria of genetic relation- 
ship, can determine what part of these alleged correspond- 
ences are real, and of force to show community of descent, 
and what part are fancied, or accidental, or the result of 
borrowing out of one language into another. 

To enter in any detail into the labyrinths of African lan- 
guage and ethnography is not essential to our present 
purpose, and will not be here undertaken. As a consequence 
of the extraordinary activity of missionary enterprise and of 

eographical exploration and discovery in Africa within a few 
years past, much curiosity and study has been directed 
towards African dialects ; a great mass of material has been 
collected, and its examination has been carried far enough to 
give us at least a general idea of the distribution of races in 
that quarter of the world. A vast deal, however, still remains 
to be done, before the almost innumerable and rapidly chang- 
ing dialects of all these wild tribes shall be brought to our 
knowledge, combined into classes and groups, and under. 


3-44 LANGUAGES OF THE [ LECT. 


stood in their resemblances and differences of material and 
structure. 

Apart from the dialects already mentioned, as belonging 
to the Hamitic or the Semitic family, the best established 
and most widely extended group of African languages is that 
one which fills nearly the whole southern part of the conti- 
nent, from a few degrees north of the equator to the Cape of 
Good Hope. It is variously called the Bantu, the Chuana, 
or the Zingian family ; or, by a simple geographical title, the 
South-African. The material as well as structural coinci- 
dences between its numerous members are fully sufficient to 
prove its unity. Its subdivisions, and the separate dialects 
composing them, need not here be rehearsed.* None of 
these dialects has any other culture than that which it has 
received under missionary auspices in the most recent period. 
They are all of an agglutinative character, forming words of 
many syllables, and, in a certain way, they are rich enough 
in forms, and in the ‘capacity of indicating different shades ‘of 
meaning and relation. Their most marked peculiarity is 
their extensive use of pronominal prefixes to the nouns; 
these are numerous—in some languages, as many as sixteen 
—and distinguish the number and generic class of the nouns 
to which they are attached. Thus, in Zulu, we have wm-fana, 
‘boy,’ aba-fana, ‘boys ;’ im-komo, ‘cow,’ tzin-komo, ‘ cows ;’ 
ili-zwi, ‘ word,’ ama-zwt, ‘words, and so on.t But farther, 
these same prefixes, or characteristic parts of them, enter into 
the formation of the adjectives, the possessive and relative 
pronouns, and the personal pronouns employed as subject or 
cbject of the verbs, agreeing with or referring to the nouns 
to which they respectively belong: for example, aba-fana 
b-ami aba-kulu, ba tanda, ‘my large boys, they love;’ but 
izin-komo z-ami izin-kulu, zi tanda, ‘my large cows, they 
love. Thus is produced a kind of alliterative congruence, 
like the rhyming one often seen in Latin, as vir-o optim-o 
maxim-o, femin-e optim-@ maxim-e. Of inflection by cases 


* See Lepsius’s General Table of Languages, already referred to; and Dr. 
Bleek’s Catalogue of Sir George Grey’s Library, at Capetown, 1858, 

¢ Our examples are taken from Rey. L. Grout’s “ Zalu-Land” (Phila. 
delphia, 1864), chap. xiv. 


IX. | SOUTH-AFRICAN FAMILY. 345 


tie South-African noun has hardly any; the case-relations 
are indicated by prefixed prepositions. Nor is there a per- 
sonal inflection of the verbs, except by means of prefixed 
pronouns. Mode and tense are signified chiefly by auxiliary 
words, also standing before the main root; but in part by 
derivative forms of the root, made by suffixes: thus, tandile, 
‘loved,’ from t¢anda, ‘love ;’ and like suffixes form derivative 
conjugations of the root, in number and in variety compar 
able with those which, as was shown in the last lecture, come 
from the Turkish verb: examples are bonisa, ‘ show,’ bonela, 
‘see for, bonana, ‘see each other,’ bonisana, ‘show each 
other,’ bonwa, ‘be seen,’ ete., etc., from bona, ‘see.’ Except 
in the interjectional forms, the vocative and second person 
imperative, every verb and noun in these languages appears 
in connected speech clothed with a pronominal prefix ; so 
that a prefix seems as essential a part of one of their words 
as does a suffix of an Indo-European word, in the older 
dialects of the family. 

A very peculiar feature of the phonetic structure of some 
of the best-known South-African languages, especially of the 
Kafir branch (including the Zulu), is the use, as consonants, 
of the sounds called clicks, made by separating the tongue 
sharply from the roof of the mouth, with accompanying suc- 
tion—sounds which we employ only in talking to horses or 
in amusing babies. As many as four of these clicks form in 
some dialects a regular part of the consonantal system, each 
being subject to variation by utterance simultaneously with 
other sounds, guttural or nasal. It is not a little remark- 
able that the clicks also abound in the tongues of that iso- 
lated branch of the Hamitic family, the Hottentot and 
Bushman, which is shut in among the South-African dialects : 
indeed, they are conjectured to be of Hottentot origin, and 
caught by the other tribes by imitation, since they are found 
only in those members of the different South-African 
branches which are neighbours of the Hottentots., 

Upon the western coast of the continent, the languages of 
the family of which we are treating extend as far as into the 
territory of Sierra Leone; but they are much intermingled 
at the north with other tongues of a different kindred. A 


046 | AFRICAN LANGUAGES. [ LECT, 


broad baud across the continent at its widest part, from Cape 
Verde on the north nearly to the equator on the south, and 
eastward to the upper waters of the Nile, is filled with dia. 
lects not reckoned az South-African, although possessing a 
structure in many respects accordant with that which we 
have just described. Conspicuous among them are the 
Fulah or Fellatah, the Mandingo, and the tongues of Bornu 
and Darfur. How far they admit of being grouped together 
asa single family, and what may be the value of their general 
structural correspondence with the other great African 
family, must be left for future researches to determine. 
One of them, the Vei, has an alphabet of its own, of native 
invention. 

Througbout nearly the whole of northern and central 
Africa, Arabic influence has for some time past been rapidly 
spreading, carrying with it a certain degree of civilization, 
the Mohammedan religion, the Koran, and some knowledge 
and use of the Arabic language. It is only in this quarter 
of the world that Semitic faith and speech still continue 
aggressive. 

There remains for consideration, of the recognized great 
families of human language, only that one which occupies the 
continent of North and South America. Of this, also, we 
must renounce all attempt at detailed treatment; it isa theme 
too vast and complicated to be dealt with otherwise than 
very summarily within our necessary limits. The conditions 
of the linguistic problem presented by the American lan- 
guages are exceedingly perplexing, for the same reason as 
those presented by the Polynesian and African dialects, and 
in a yet higher degree. ‘The number, variety, and change- 
ableness of the different tongues is wonderful. Dialectic 
division is carried to its extreme among them; the isolating 
and diversifying tendencies have had full course, with little 
counteraction from the conserving and assimilating forces. 
The continent seems ever to have been peopled by a con- 
ceries of petty tribes, incessantly at warfare, or standing oft 
from one another in jealous and suspicious seclusion. Cer- 
tain striking exceptions, it is true, are present to the mind of 
cvery oue. Mexico, Central America, and Peru, at the time 


rx. | AMERICAN LANGUAGES. 347 


of the Spanish discovery and conquest, were the seat of 
empires possessing an organized system of government, with 
national creeds and institutions, with modes of writing and 
styles of architecture, and other appliances of a considerably 
developed culture, of indigenous origin. Such relies, too, 
as the great mounds which are scattered so widely through 
our western country, and the ancient workings upon the 
veins and ledges of native copper along the southern shore 
of Lake Superior, show that other large portions of the 
northern continent had not always been in the same savage 
condition as that in which our ancestors found them. Yet 
these were exceptions only, not changing the general rule; 
and there is reason to believe that, as the civilization of the 
Mississippi valley had been extinguished by the incursion 
and conquest of more barbarous tribes, so a similar fate was 
threatening that of the southern peoples: that, in fact, 
American culture was on its’way to destruction even with- 
out European interference, as European culture for a time 
had seemed to be, during the Dark Ages which attended the 
downfall of the Roman empire. If the differentiation of 
American language has been thus unchecked by the influence 
of culture, it has been also favoured by the influence of the 
variety of climate and mode of life. While the other great 
families occupy, for the most part, one region or one zone, 
the American tribes have been exposed to all the difference 
of circumstances which can find place between the Arctic 
and the Antarctic oceans, amid ice-fields, mountains, valleys, 
on dry table-lands and in reeking river-basins, along shores 
of every clime. Moreover, these languages have shown 
themselves to possess a peculiar mobility and changeableness 
of material. There are groups of kindred tribes whose 
separation is known to be of not very long standing, but in 
whose speech the correspondences are almost overwhelmed 
and hidden from sight by the discordances which have sprung 
up. In more than one tongue it has been remarked that 
books of instruction prepared by missionaries have become 
antiquated and almost unintelligible in three or four genera- 
tions. Add to all this, that our knowledge of the family be- 
gins in the most recent period, less than four hundred years 


343 LANGUAGES OF THE [ LECT. 


ago; that, though it has been since penetrated and pressed 
on every side by cultivated nations, the efforts made to collect 
and preserve information respecting it have been only spas- 
modic and fragmentary ; that it is almost wholly destitute of 
literature, and even of traditions of any authority and value ; 
and that great numbers of its constituent members have 
perished, in the wasting away of the tribes by mutual war- 
fare, by pestilence and famine, and by the encroachments of 
more powerful races—and it will be clearly seen that the 
comprehensive comparative study of American languages is 
beset with very great difficulties. 

Yet it is the confident opinion of linguistic scholars that a 
fundamental unity lies at the base of all these infinitely vary- 
ing forms of speech ; that they may be, and probably are, all 
descended from a single parent language.* For, whatever 
their differences of material, there is a single type or plan 
upon which their forms are developed and their constructions 
made, from the Arctic Ocean to Cape Horn; and one suffi- 
ciently peculiar and distinctive to constitute a genuine indi- 
cation of relationship. This type is called the incorporative 
or polysynthetic. It tends to the excessive and abnormal 
agglomeration of distinct significant elements in its words ; 
whereby, on the one hand, cumbrous compounds are formed 
as the names of objects, and a character of tedious and time- 
wasting polysyllabism is given to the language—see, for 
example, the three to ten-syllabled numeral and pronominal 
words of our western Indian tongues; or the Mexican name 
for ‘goat,’ kwa-kwauh tentsone, literally ‘head-tree (horn)- 
lip-hair (beard),’ or ‘the horned and bearded one ’—and, on 
the other hand, and what is of yet more importance, an 
unwieldy aggregation, verbal or guasi-verbal, is substituted 


* T make no account here of isolated dialects of an exceptional character, 
like the Otomi in central Mexico, which is asserted to be a monosyllabic lan- 
guage; nor of others which may exhibit the characteristic features of Ameri- 
can speech so faintly, or in such a modified form, as to be’ hardly recognizable 
by their structure as American: it remains yet to be determined whether 
such seeming exceptions do or do not admit of explanation as the result of 
special historical development. Nor, of course, is the possibility denied that 
fuller knowledge will oring to light tongues radically and irreconcilably dise 
corjant from the general type. 


rx. ] AMERICAN FAMILY. 849 


for the phrase or sentence, with its distinct and balanced 
members. Thus, the Mexican says “ I-flesh-eat,” as a single 
word, compounded of three elements; or if, for emphasis, 
the object is left to stand separate, it is at least first repre- 
sented by a pronoun in the verbal compound: as, “ I-it-eat, 
the flesh ;” or “I-it-him-give, the bread, my son,” for “TI 
give my son the bread.” 

The incorporative type is not wholly peculiar to the lan- 
guages of our continent. A trace of it (in the insertion, 
among the verbal forms, of an objective as well as a subject- 
ive pronominal ending) is found even in one of the Ugrian 
dialects of the Scythian family, the Hungarian; and the 
Basque, of which we shall presently speak more particu- 
larly, exhibits it in a very notable measure. It is found, too, 
in considerably varying degree and style of development in 
the different branches of the American family. But its 
general effect is still such that the linguist is able to claim 
that the languages to which it belongs are, in virtue of 
‘their structure, akin with one another, and distinguished 
from all other known tongues. 

Not only do the subjective and objective pronouns thus 
enter into the substance of the verb, but also a great variety 
of modifiers of the verbal action, adverbs, in the form of 
particles and fragments of words; thus, almost everything 
which helps to make expression forms a part of verbal con- 
jugation, and the verbal paradigm becomes well-nigh inter- 
minable. An extreme instance of excessive synthesis is af- 
forded in the Cherokee word-phrase wi-ni-taw-ti-ge-gi-na-li- 
skaw-lung-ta-naw-ne-li-ti-se-sti, ‘ they will by that time have 
nearly finished granting [favours] from a distance to thee 
and me.’ * 

Other common traits, which help to strengthen our con- 
clusion that these languages are ultimately related, are not 
wanting. Such are, for example, the habit of combining 
words by fragments, by one or two representative syllables ; 
the direct conversion of nouns, substantive and adjective, 
into verbs, and their conjugation as such ; peculiarities of 


* A. Gallatin in Archxologia Americana, vol. ii. (Cambridge, 1836), p. 201, 


350 CHARACTER AND CONNECTIONS [LECT, 


generic distinction—many languages dividing animate from 
inanimate beings (somewhat as we do by the use of who and 
what), with arbitrary and fanciful details of classification, 
like those exhibited by the Indo-European languages in their 
separation of masculine and feminine ; the possession of a 
very peculiar scheme for denoting the degrees of family 
relationship ; and so on. 

As regards their material constitution, their assignment of 
certain sounds to represent certain ideas, our Indian dialects 
show, as already remarked, a very great discordance. It has 
been claimed that there are not less than a hundred lan- 
guages or groups upon the continent, between whose words 
are discoverable no correspondences which might not be suf- 
ficiently explained as the result of accident. Doubtless a 
more thorough and sharpsighted investigation, a more pene- 
trating linguistic analysis and comparison—though, under 
existing circumstances, any even distant approximation to 
the actual beginning may be hopeless—would considerably 
reduce this number; yet there might still remain as many 
unconnected groups as are to be found in all Europe and 
Asia. It is needless to undertake here an enumeration of 
the divisions of Indian speech: we will but notice a few of 
the most important groups occupying our own portion of 
the continent. 

In the extreme north, along the whole shore of the Arctic 
ocean, are the Eskimo dialects, with which is nearly allied the 
Greenlandish. Below them is spread out, on the west, the 
great Athapaskan group. On the east, and as far south as 
the line of Tennessee and North Carolina, stretches the im- 
mense region occupied by the numerous dialects of the 
Algonquin or Delaware stock; within it, however, is enclosed. 
the distinct branch of Iroquois languages. Our south-east- 
ern states were in possession of the Florida group, compris- 
ing the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee. The great nation of 
the Sioux or Dakotas gives its name to the branch which oe- 
cupied the Missouri valley and parts of the lower Mississippi. 
Another wide-spread sub-family, including the Shoshonee and 
Comanche, ranged from the shores of Texas north-westward 
to the borders of California and the territory of the Atha- 


Ix.] OF AMERICAN LANGUAGES. 351 


paskas ; and the Pacific coast was occupied by a medley of 
tribes. Mexico and Central America, finally, were the homo 
of a great variety of tongues, that of the cultivated Aztecs, 
with its kindred, having the widest range. 

The linguistic condition of America, and the state of our 
knowledge respecting it, being such as we have here seen, it 
is evident how futile must be at present any attempt to 
prove by the evidence of language the peopling of the conti- 
nent from Asia, or from any other part of the world outside, 
We have already noticed that a relationship is asserted to 
exist between the Eskimo branch of American language and 
a dialect or two in the extreme north-east of Asia; but the 
fact that it is a specifically Eskimo relationship is sufficient 
to prove its worthlessness as a help to the explanation of 
the origin of American language in general, and to make it 
probable that the communication there has been from 
America to Asia, and not the contrary. ‘To enter upon a 
bare and direct comparison of modern American with modern 
Asiatic dialects, for the purpose of discovering signs of 
genetic connection between them, would be a proceeding 
utterly at variance with all the principles of linguistic 
science, and could lead to no results possessing any signifi- 
cance or value. One might as well compare together the 
English, the modern Syriac, and the Hungarian, in order to 
determine the ultimate relationship of the Indo-European, 
Semitic, and Scythian families. Sound method (as was 
pointed out in the sixth lecture) requires that we study each 
dialect, group, branch, and family by itself, before we venture 
to examine and pronounce upon its more distant connections. 
What we have to do at present, then, is simply to learn all 
that we possibly can of the Indian languages themselves; to 
settle their internal relations, elicit their laws of growth, 
reconstruct their older forms, and ascend toward their ori- 
ginal condition as far as the material within our reach, and 
the state in which it is presented, will allow; if our 
studies shall at length put us in a position to deal with the 
question of their Asiatic derivation, we will rejoice at it. I 
do not myself expect that valuable light will ever be shed 
upon the subject by linguistie evidence: others may be more 


352 STUDY OF AMERICAN LANGUAGES. [LEOT 


sanguine; but all must at any rate agree that, as things are, 
the subject is in no position to be taken up and discussed 
with profit. The absurd theories which have been advanced 
. and gravely defended by men of learning and acuteness re- 
specting the origin of the Indian races are hardly worth even 
a passing reference. The culture of the more advanced 
communities has been irrefragably proved to be derived from 
Egypt, Phenicia, India, and nearly every other anciently 
civilized country of the Old World: the whole history of 
migration of the tribes themselves has been traced in detail 
over Behring’s Straits, through the islands of the Pacific, and 
across the Atlantic; they have been identified with the 
Canaanites, whom Joshua and the Israelites exterminated ; 
and, worst of all, with the ten Israelitish tribes deported from 
their own country by the sovereigns of Mesopotamia! When 
men sit down with minds crammed with scattering items of 
historical information, abounding prejudices, and teeming 
fancies, to the solution of questions respecting whose con- 
ditions they know nothing, there is no folly which they are 
not prepared to commit. 

Our national duty and honour are peculiarly concerned in 
this matter of the study of aboriginal American languages, 
as the most fertile and important branch of American arche- 
ology. Europeans accuse us, with too much reason, of 
indifference and inefficiency with regard to preserving me- 
morials of the races whom we have dispossessed and are dis- 
possessing, and to promoting a thorough comprehension 
of their history. Indian scholars, and associations which 
devote themselves to gathering together and making public 
linguistic and other archeological materials for construction 
of the proper ethnology of the continent, are far rarer than 
they should be among us. Not a literary institution in our 
country has among its teachers one whose business it is to 
investigate the languages of our aboriginal populations, and 
to acquire and diffuse true knowledge respecting them and 
their history.* So much the more reason have we to be 
grateful to the few who are endeavouring to make up our de- 


* This reproach, at least, is about to be removed, by the establishment of 
8 chair of American archeology at Cambridge. 


1x. | BASQUE LANGUAGE. 35% 


ficiencies by self-prompted study, and especially to those 
self-denying men who, under circumstances of no small dif. 
ficulty, are or have been devoting themselves to the work of 
collecting and giving to the world original materials. The 
Smithsonian Institution has recently taken upon itself the 
office of encouraging, guiding, and giving effect to the 
labours of collectors, under special advantages derived from 
its relation to the Government, with laudable zeal, and with 
the best promise of valuable results. No department of in- 
quiry, certainly, within the circle of the historical sciences, 
has a stronger claim upon the attention of such a national 
institution ; and it becomes all Americans to countenance 
and aid its efforts by every means in their power. 

Before closing this cursory and imperfect survey of the 
varieties of human language, we have to glance at one or 
two dialects or groups of dialects which have hitherto re- 
sisted all attempts at classification. Most noteworthy 
among these is the Basque, spoken in a little district of the 
Pyrenees, on both sides of the border between France and 
Spain, enveloping the angle of the Bay of Biscay, between 
Bayonne and Balbao. The Basques are well identified as 
descended from the primitive Iberian population which is 
supposed to have filled the Spanish peninsula before the in- 
trusion of the Celts: their stubborn and persistent character 
and the inaccessibility of their mountain retreats have 
enabled their native idiom successfully to resist the assimi- 
lating influences exercised by successive Celtic, Roman, and 
Gothic conquest and domination. It stands, so far as is yet 
known, alone among the languages of mankind; kindred has 
been sought and even claimed for it in every direction, but 
to no good purpose. It is, then, naturally enough conjec- 
tured to be a sole surviving remnant of the speech of an ab- 
original race, peopling some part of Europe before the 
immigration of the Indo-European tribes, perhaps before 
that of the Scythian; and the possibility that it may be so 
invests it with an unusual degree of interest. Its structure 
is exceedingly peculiar, intricate, and difficult of analysis. 
As we have already had occasion to notice, it possesses much 


more striking analogies with the aboriginal languages of 
23 


354 ETRUSCAN AND CAUCASIAN LANGUAGES. [ LECT, 


America than with any others that are known: like them, it 
is highly polysynthetic, incorporating into its verbal forms a 
host of pronominal relations which are elsewhere expressed 
by independent words ; like them, also, it compounds words 
together by representative fragments. But it does not 
show the same tendency to fuse the whole sentence into a 
verb; its nouns have an inflection which is much more 
Scythian than American in type; and there are other differ- 
ences which distinctly enough discourage the conjecture that 
it can be historically akin with the tongues of this continent. 
Some other among the various populations of southern Eu- 
rope, treated by the ancients as of strange tongue and line- 
age, and which have now totally disappeared, may possibly 
have been akin with the Basques: such questions are cover- 
ed with a darkness which we cannot hope ever to see dis- 
pelled. 

In Italy are still found the relics of one of these isolated 
and perished peoples, the Etruscans. They were a race of 
much higher culture than the Basques, and their neighbour- 
hood to Rome, and their resulting influence, peaceful and 
warlike, upon her growing polity and developing history, 
give them a historical importance to which the Iberian race 
ean lay no claim. Inscriptions in their language, written in 
legible characters, and in some instances of assured mean- 
ing, are preserved to our day; yet its linguistic character 
and connections are an unsolved and probably insoluble 
problem. Every few years, some one of those philologists 
whose judgments are easily taken captive by a few superfi- 
cial correspondences claims to have proved its relationship 
with some known family, and thus to have determined the 
ethnological position of the race that spoke it ; but his argu- 
ments and conclusions are soon set aside as of no more value 
than others already offered and rejected. 

Again, there is found in the mountain-range of the Cau- 
casus a little knot of idioms which have hitherto baffled the 
efforts of linguistic scholars to connect them with other 
known forms of speech. Their principal groups are four; 
the Georgian and the Circassian stretch along the southern 
and northern shores respectively of the eastern extremity of 


IX. ] ISOLATED BANGUAGES, 855 


the Black Sea, and through the mountains nearly to the 
Caspian; the Lesghian borders the Caspian; and the 
Mitsjeghian lies between it and the Circassian. The Geor- 
gian possesses a peculiar alphabet and a literature; but the 
whole group, except as it presents a problem for the solu- 
tion of the linguistic ethnographer, has no special import- 
ance, 

The Albanian or Skipetar, the modern representative of 
the ancient Illyrian, has already been spoken of as doubt- 
fully classifiable with the Indo-European languages. If its 
connection with them shall not finally be made out to the 
satisfaction of the learned, it, too, will have to be numbered 
among the isolated and problematical tongues. 

One more Asiatic dialect may be worth a moment’s notice: 
the Yenisean, occupying a tract of country along the middle 
course of the Yenisei, with traces in the mountains about 
the head waters of that river; it belongs to the feeble and 
scanty remnant of a people which is lost in the midst of 
Scythian tribes, and apparently destined to be ere long ab- 
sorbed by them, but which is ‘proved to be of different race 
by its wholly discordant language. 

The number of such isolated tongues is, of course, liable to 
be increased as we cometo know more thoroughly the linguistic 
condition of regions of the world which are as yet only par- 
tially explored. There is a possibility that many types of 
speech, once spread over wide domains, may exist at preset 
only in scanty fragments, as well as that some may have 
('sappeared altogether, ‘eaving not even a trace behind 


LECTURE X. 


Classification of languages. Morphological classifications ; their defecta, 
Schleicher’s morphological notation. Classification by general rank, 
Superior value of genetic division. Bearing of linguistic science on 
ethnology. Comparative advantages and disadvantages of linguistio 
and physical evidence of race. Indo-European language and race 
mainly coincident. Difficulty of the ethnological problem. Inability 
of language to prove either unity or variety of human species. Acci- 
dental correspondences ; futility of root comparisons. 


Our inquiries into the history and relations of human 
languages have last brought us to a review and brief exam- 
ination of their groupings into families, so far as yet accom- 
plished by the labours of linguistic students. The families 
may be briefly recapitulated as follows. First in rank and 
importance is the Indo-European, filling nearly the whole of 
central and southern Europe, together with no inconsider- 
able portion of south-western Asia, and with colonies in 
every quarter of the globe; it includes the languages of 
nearly all the modern, and of some of the most important of 
the ancient, civilized and civilizing races. Next is the 
Semitic, of prominence in the world’s history second only to 
the Indo-European, having its station in Arabia and the 
neighbouring regions of Asia and Africa. Then follows the 
loosely aggregated family of the Scythian dialects, as we 
chose to term them, ranging from Norway almost to 
Behring’s Straits, and occupying a good part of central Asia 
also, with outliers in southern Europe (Hungary and 
Turkey), and possibly in southernmost Asia (the Dekhan, or 
peninsula of India). Further, the south-eastern Asiatic or 


at CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES. 3A7 


monosyllabic family, in China and Farther India, and 
countries adjacent to these; the Malay-Polynesian and 
Melanesian, scattered over the numberless islands of the 
Pacific and Indian Oceans; the Hamitic, composed of the 
Egyptian and its congeners, chiefly in northern Africa; the 
South-African, filling Africa about and below the equator ; 
and the Amerian, covering with its greatly varied forms 
our western continent, from the Arctic Ocean to the Antarctic, 
Besides these great families, we took note of several isolated 
languages or lesser groups, of doubtful or wholly unknown 
relationship: as those in extreme north-eastern Asia, in the 
Caucasian mountains, in central Africa; as the Basque in 
the Pyrenees, the Albanian in north-western Greece, the 
Yenisean in Siberia, and the extinct Etruscan in northern 
Italy. 

The scheme of classification, as thus drawn out, was a 
genetical one, founded on actual historical relationship. Each 
family or group was intended to be made up of those 
tongues which there is found sufficient reason to regard as 
kindred dialects, as common descendants of the same original. 
We were obliged, however, to confess that our classification 
had not everywhere the same value, as the evidences of 
relationship were not of an equally unequivocal character in all 
the families, or else had been thus far incompletely gathered 
in and examined. Where, as in the case of Indo-European 
and Semitic speech, we find structural accordance combined 
with identity of material, as traced out and determined by 
long-continued and penetrating study on the part of many 
investigators, there the unity of the families is placed beyond 
the reach of reasonable doubt. But it is unfortunately true 
that these two are the only groups of wide extent and first- 
rate importance respecting which the linguistic student can 
speak with such fulness of confidence ; everywhere else, there 
is either some present deficiency of information, which time 
may or may not remove, or the conditions are such that our 
belief in the genetic relationship must rest upon the more 
questionable ground of correspondence in structural develop- 
ment. We may by no means deny that morphologicai 
accordance is capable of rising to such a value as should 


358 MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATIONS [LEOT. 


make it a sufficient and convincing evidence of genetic 
unity ; but it is evidently of a less direct and unmistakable 
character than material identity, and requires for its estima- 
tion a wider range of knowledge, a more acute insight, and a 
more cautious judgment. If two languages agree in the 
very material of which their words and apparatus of gram- 
matical inflection are composed, to a degree beyond what 
can possibly be regarded as the effect of accident or of 
borrowing, the conclusion that they are akin is inevitable ; 
nothing but community of linguistic tradition can explain 
such phenomena: but agreement in the style only in which 
words are composed and thought expressed admits of being 
attributed to causes other than historical—to equality of 
mental endowment, of intellectual force and training. We 
may look hopefully forward to the time when linguistic 
science shall have reached such a pitch of perfection, shall 
have so thoroughly mastered the infinitely varied phenomena 
of universal human language and traced out their causes, 
that she shall be able to separate with certainty the effects 
of ethnic capacity from those of transmitted habit: but that 
time has certainly not yet come; and, as the value of mor- 
phological accordances as evidence of genetic connection has 
hitherto been repeatedly overrated, so it will long, and 
always in unskilful or incautious hands, be peculiarly liable 
to a like mistreatment. 

We have already had occasion to refer to and describe 
some of the principal structural peculiarities which are illus- 
trated in the variety of human tongues; but it will be worth 
while here to bestow a few words farther upon them, and 
upon the systems of morphological classification to which 
they have served as foundation. 

The languages of mankind have been divided into two 
grand classes, the monosyllabic (otherwise called isolating, 
or radical) and the polysyllabic (or inflectional), To the 
former belong the tongues of China and Farther India, with 
their relatives in the same quarter of Asia, and perhaps one 
or two idioms in other parts of the world. In them there is a 
formal identity of root and word; none of their yocables are 
made up of radical and formative elements, the one giving 


é 


x.] | OF LANGUAGRHs. 359 


the principal idea, the other indicating its limitation, appli- 
eation, or relation; they possess no formally distinguished 
parts of speech. Usage may assign to some of their roots 
the offices which in inflectional tongues are filled by inflective 
endings, suffixes or prefixes; it may also stamp some as 
adjectives, others as nouns, as pronouns, as verbs, and so 
on: yet means of this sort can only partially supply their 
lack of the resources possessed by more happily developed 
languages; categories undistinguished in expression are but 
imperfectly, if at all, distinguished in apprehension ; thought 
is but brokenly represented and feebly aided by its instru- 
ment. ‘T'o the latter, or inflectional class, belong all the 
other languages of the world, which, whatever and however 
great their differences, have at least this in common, that 
their signs of category and relation are not always separate 
words, but parts of other words, that their vocables are, to 
some extent, made up of at least two elements, the one 
radical, the other formative. There can be, it is evident, no 
more fundamental difference in linguistic structure than 
this. And yet, it is not an absolute and determinate one. 
It lies in the nature of the case that, as the inflectional lan- 
guages have grown out of a monosyllabic and non-inflecting 
stage, there should be certain tongues, as there are in other 
tongues certain forms, which stand so closely upon the line of 
division between the two stages, that it is hard to tell whether 
they are the one thing or the other. In our own tongue, there 
is no definite division-line to be drawn anywhere in the 
series of steps that conducts from a mere collocation to a 
pure form-word—from house floor to house-top, from tear-filled 
to tearful, from godlike to godly ; and, in like manner, it is 
often a matter of doubt, in languages of low development, 
where isolation ends and where a loose agglutination begins. 
Thus, even the Chinese, the purest type of the isolating 
structure, is by some regarded as, in its colloquial forms, and 
yet more in some of its dialects, a language of compounded 
words ; and the possession of one or two real formative ele- 
ments has been claimed for the Burmese ; while the Hima- 
laya is likely to furnish dialects whose character, as isolated 
or agglutinative, will be much disputed. 


360 MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATIONS [LEOT. 


But the main objection to the classification we are con- 
sidering is not so much its want of absolute distinctness (a 
defect incident to all classification, in every department of 
science) as its one-sidedness: it is too much lke the pro- 
verbial lover’s division of the world into two parts, that 
where the beloved object is and that where she is not: it 
leaves almost all human tongues in one huge class together. 
Accordingly a much more popular and current system dis- 
tinguishes three primary orders, separating the mass of 
inflectional languages into such as are agglutinative, or 
attach their formative elements somewhat loosely to a root 
which is not liable to variation; and such as are inflective, 
dr unite more thoroughly their radical and formative ele- 
ments, and make internal changes of the root itself bear 
their part, either primarily or secondarily, in the expression 
of grammatical relations. The distinction between these 
three orders is well expressed by Professor Max Miiller in 
the following terms :— 

“1. Roots may be used as words, each root preserving its 
full independence. 

“2. Two roots may be joined together to form words, 
and in these compounds one root may lose its independence. 

“3. Two roots may be joined together to form words, 
and in these compounds both roots may lose their independ- 
ence.”’* 

No better scheme of division, of a simple and comprehen- 
sive character, has yet been devised than this, and it is likely 
to maintain itself long in use. It faithfully represents, in 
the main, three successive stages in the history of language, 
three ascending grades of linguistic development. But its 
value must not be overrated, nor its defects passed without 
notice. In the first place, it does not include all the possible 
and actually realized varieties in the mode of formation of 
words. It leaves altogether out of account that internal 
change of vowels which, as was shown in the eighth lecture, 
is the characteristic and principal means of grammatical 
inflection in the Semitic tongues. The distinctions of gatala, 
‘he killed, gutila, ‘he was ‘killed, gattala, ‘he massacred,’ 

* Lectures, first series, eighth lecture. 


— 


x.] AND THEIR DEFECTS, . 361 


gatala, ‘he tried to kill,’ aqtala, ‘he caused to kill,’ and the 
like, are not explainable by any composition of roots and loss 
of their independence, even though the somewhat analogous 
differences of man and men, lead and led, sing and sang, sit 
and set, do admit of such explanation. In the second place, 
it is liable to something of the same reproach of one-sided- 
ness which lies against the former, the double method of 
classification. It puts into a Separate class, as inflective 
languages, only two families, the Indo-European and the 
Semitic: these are, to be sure, of wide extent and unap- 
proached importance; yet the mass of spoken tongues is 
still left in one immense and heterogeneous body. And 
finally, a yet more fundamental objection to the scheme is 
this heterogeneity, which characterizes not its middle class 
alone, but its highest also. It classes Indo-European and 
Semitic speech together, as morphologically alike, while yet 
their structural discordance is vastly greater than that 
which separates Indo-European from many of the agglutina- 
tive tongues—in some respects, even greater than that 
which separates Indo-European from the generality of agelu- 
tinative and from the isolating tongues. Not only are the 
higher Scythian dialects, as the Finnish and Hungarian, 
almost inflective, and inflective upon a plan which is suffi- 
ciently analogous with the Indo-European, but, from a 
theoretical point of view (however the case may be histori- 
cally), Chinese, Scythian, and Indo-European are so many 
steps in one line and direction of progress, differing in degree 
but not in kind: Semitic speech, on the other hand, if it 
started originally from the same or a like centre, has reached 
an equally distant point ina wholly different direction. The 
two inflective families may lie upon the same circumference, 
but they are separated by the whole length of the diameter, 
being twice as far from one another as is either from the 
indifferent middle. A less fundamental discordance, per- 
haps, but an equal variety of structure, belongs to those 
tongues which are classed together as agglutinative. Tha 
order includes such extremes in degree of agglutination as 
the barren and almost isolating Manchu or Egyptian, on the 
one hand, and, on the other, the exuberantly ageregative 


862 MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATIONS [LEOT. 


Turkish and the often excessively agglomerative American or 
Basque ; it includes such differences in the mode of agglu- 
tination as are presented by the Scythian, which makes its 
combinations solely by suffixes, and the Malay or South- 
African, which form theirs mainly by prefixes. Here, again, 
it may be made a question whether the morphological 
relationship of Scythian and Indo-European be not closer 
than that of Scythian and Malay. The principle which 
divides the two former is, it is true, reasonably to be regarded 
as of a higher order than that which divides the two latter ; 
yet it is more teleological than morphological; it concerns 
rather the end attained than the means of attainment. The 
reach and value, too, of the distinctively inflective principle, 
as developed in Indo-European language, is, as I cannot but 
think, not infrequently overrated. In no small part of the 
material of our own tongue, for example, the root or theme 
maintains its own form and distinction from the affixes, and 
these their distinction from one another, not less completely 
than is the case in Scythian, All the derivatives of love, as 
love-d, lov-ing, lov-er, love-ly ; the derivatives of true, as tru-ly, 
tru-th, tru-th-ful, tru-th-ful-ly, wn-tru-thful-ly—these, and the 
host of formations like them, are strictly agglutinative in 
type: but we do not recognize in them any inferiority as 
means of expression to those derivatives in which the radical 
part has undergone a more marked fusion, or disguising 
change. Loved from love is as good a preterit as Jed from 
lead, or sang from sing ; truth from true is as good an abstract 
as length from long, or jilth from foul; nor is the Latin 
ledo-r, ‘I am hurt,’ from Jedo, ‘I hurt,’ inferior to the 
nearly equivalent Arabic gutila, from gatala: The claim 
might plausibly enough be set up that the unity which the 
Scythian gives to its derivative words by making the vowels 
of their suffixes sympathize with that of the principal or 
radical element, is at least as valuable, in itself considered, as 
the capacity of an Indo-European root to be phonetically 
affected by the ending that is attached to it—a subjection of 
the superior to the inferior element. Not that the actual 
working-out of the latter principle in the tongues of our 
family has not produced results of higher value than the 


x.] AND THEIR DEFECTS. 383 


former has led to; but this may be owing in great measure 
to the way in which the two have been handled respectively, 

The immensely comprehensive order of agelutinative lan- 
guages is sometimes reduced a little by setting apart from it 
a polysynthetic or incorporative class, composed of the 
Basque and the American family. This, however, is rather 
a subdivision of one of the members of the triple system than 
the establishment of a new, a quadruple, scheme of classifica- 
tion. ) 

Professor Miiller* seeks to find a support and explanation 
of the threefold division of human language which we are 
now considering by paralleling it with the threefold con- 
dition of human society, as patriarchal, nomadic, and politi- 
cal. Monosyllabie or “family languages” are in place, 
according to him, among the members of a family, whose in- 
timacy, and full knowledge of one another’s dispositions and 
thoughts, make it possible for each to understand the other 
upon the briefest and most imperfect hints. Agglutinative 
or “nomadic languages” are required by the circumstances 
of a wandering and unsettled life ; the constantly separating 
and reassembling tribes could not keep up a mutual intelli- 
geuce if they did not maintain the integrity of the radical 
elements of their speech. Inflective or “state languages ” 
are rendered possible by a regulated and stable condition of 
society, where uninterrupted intercourse and constant tra- 
dition facilitate mutual comprehension, notwithstanding the 
fusion and integration of root and affix. The comparison is 
ingenious and entertaining, but it is too little favoured by 
either linguistic philosophy or linguistic history to be en- 
titled to any other praise. It would fain introduce into the 
processes of linguistic life an element of reflective anticipa- 
tion, of prevision and deliberate provision, which is altogether 
foreign to them. That wandering tribes should, in view ot 
their scanty intercourse, their frequent partings to be fol- 
lowed by possible meetings, conclude that they ought to 
keep their roots unmodified, is quite inconceivable ; nor is it 


* In his Letter on the Classification of the Turanian Languages, p. 21 
8eq.: see also his Lectures, first series, 


B64 SCHLEICHER’S SYSTEM [ LECT. 


easy to see what purpose the resolution should serve, if the 
endings are at the same time to be suffered to vary 8o 
rapidly that mutual unintelligibility is soon brought about. 
In every uncultivated community, the language is left to take 
care of itself; it becomes what the exigencies of practical 
use make it, not what a forecasting view of future possibili- 
ties leads its speakers to think that it might with advantage 
be made to be: let two tribes be parted from one another, 
and neither has any regard to the welfare of its fellow in 
shaping its own daily speech. In point of fact, moreover, 
Indo-European languages were inflective, were “state lan- 
guages,” long before the tribes had formed states — while 
many of them were as nomadic in their habits as the wildest 
of the so-called Turanian tribes. And to denominate the 
immense and highly-organized Chinese empire a mere exag- 
gerated family, and account for the peculiarities of its speech 
by reference to the conditions of a family, is fanciful in the 
extreme. No nomenclature founded on such unsubstantial 
considerations has a good claim to the acceptance of lin- 
guistic scholars; and the one in question has, it is believed, 
won no general currency. 

A very noteworthy attempt has been made within a short 
time by Professor Schleicher, of Jena,* to give greater ful- 
ness and precision to the morphological classification and 
description of language, by a more thorough analysis, and a 
kind of algebraic notation, of morphological characteristics. 
A pure root, used as a word without variation of form or 
addition of formative elements, he denotes by a cap*tal letter, 
as 4: a connected sentence expressed by a serieg of such 
elements, as is sometimes the case in Chinese, he would re- 
present by A BC,and so on. Such a sentence we may 
rudely illustrate by an English phrase like jfish like water, 
in which each word is a simple root or theme, without for- 
mal designation of relations. A root which, while retain- 


* See his paper, ‘Contribution to the Morphology of Language,” in the 
Memoirs of the Academy of St. Petersburg, vol. i, No. 7 (1859) ; also, the 
Introduction to his work, the ‘German Language” (Stuttgart, 1860), p. 11 seq, 

¢ Of course, the parallel is to be regarded as only an imperfect one: 
though these three words are to our apprehension primitives, they are fax 


x.] OF MORPHOLOGICAL NOTATION, 365 


ing its substantial independence, is so modified in signification 
and restricted in application as to form an auxiliary or ad- 
junct to another root (which was shown in the last lecture to be 
a frequent phenomenon in the isolating languages), is marked 
by an accented letter, as 4’: thus, in the English, shall like 
would be represented by 4’ +4; shall have put, by A’ + B 
+- A: the interposed sign of addition indicating the close- 
ness of relation between the elements. The position of the 
accented letters in the formula would point out whether the 
auxiliaries are placed after the main word, as in Burmese, or 
before it, as in Siamese, or on either or both sides, as some- 
times in Chinese. 

If, now, the formative element is combined with the radical 
into a single word, it is indicated by a small letter, which is 
put before or after the capital which stands for the root, ac- 
cording to the actual position of the elements in combination. 
Thus, if we represent true by A, untrue would be aA ; truly 
or truth would be da; untruly,aAb; untruthfully,aAbed; and 
soon. Expressions of this kind belong to the agglutinative 
type of structure; and they are, it is plain, capable of very 
considerable variation, so as to be made to denote the 
various kinds and degrees of agglutination. It is possible, 
for example, to distinguish the endings of inflection from 
those of derivation, or elements of pronominal from those of 
predicative origin, by the use of a different series of letters 
(as the Greek) to indicate one of the classes: thus, truths 
might be Aaa, but truthful Aab; babalarumdan, in Turkish 
(see above, p. 318), might be AaBy, but sevishdirilememek, 
Aabcdef. An adroit use of such means of distinction might 
enable one even to set forth with sufficient clearness the 
peculiarities and intricacies of polysynthetic tongues. 


from being ultimate roots; they all either contain formative elements added 
to such a root, or have possessed and lost them; each is, to be sure, employ- 
able as noun, adjective, or verb, without change of form, yet not, like Chinese 
roots, in virtue of an original indefiniteness of meaning, but as one distinct 
part of speech is in our usage convertible directly into others ; nor can it be 
said that, even as they stand, they are altogether formless; for each is de- 
fined in certain relations by the absence of formative elements which it would 
otherwise exhibit: water is shown to be singular by lacking an s, fish and 
ike to be plural by the absence of s from dike. 


B66 SCHLEICHER’S MORPHOLOGICAL NOTATION. [LEOT. 


Again, an inflective change of the root itself for the ex« 
pression of grammatical relations is denotable by exponents 
attached to the root-symbol. Thus, man being A, men would 
be A*; men’s, A%a; sang, sung, song, from sing, would be de- 
noted by A‘, A’, A’; spoken, from speak, would be A%a; its 
German counterpart, gesprochen, aA%. And in the Semitic 
tongues, where the root never appears without a vocalization 
which is formal and significant, the constant radical emblem 
would be A*.* 

Compounds, finally, would be expressed in this method by 
putting side by side the symbols expressive of their separate 
members, the capital letters with their modifications and ad- 
juncts. LHouse-top would be AB; songwriter, A* Ba; and 
so on. 

It is unnecessary to explain with any more of detail 
Professor Schleicher’s system of morphological notation, or 
to spend many words in pointing out its convenience and 
value. It may evidently be made a means of apprehending 
distinctly, and setting forth clearly, the main structural fea- 
tures of any language. It will not, indeed, enable us to put 
in a brief and compact form of statement the whole morpho- 
~ logical character of every spoken tongue. Most tongues 
admit no small variety of formations ; each must be judged 
by its prevailing modes of formation, by the average of high- 
est and lowest modes, by their respective frequency of 
application, and the purposes they are made to serve. It 
does not help us to a simple and facile seale and classification 
of all the dialects of mankind; but this is to be imputed to 


* Professor Schleicher, indeed, adopts this emblem as that of the Indo- 
European root also, since he holds the view, briefly stated and controverted 
above (in the eighth lecture, p. 293), that the radicals of our family were 
originally liable to a regular variation, of symbolic significance, for purposes 
of grammatical expression. I regard it, on the contrary, as the weak point in 
his system, as applied by himself, that it does not distinguish an internal 
flection like the Semitic-—which, so far as we can trace its history, is ulti- 
mate and original, and which continues in full force, in old material and in 
new formations, through the whole history of the languages—from one like 
the Indo-European, which is rather secondary and accidental, constantly 
arising in new cases under the influence of phonetic circumstances, but nevet 
winning a pervading force, and in many members of the family hardly taking 
on anywhere a regular form and office, as significant of relations. 


x.] TESTS OF LINGUISTIC RANK. 367 


it as a merit, not as a fault: it thus fairly represents the 
exceeding variety of languages, the complexity of the cha- 
racteristics which distinguish them, and their incapacity of 
separation into a few sharply defined classes. 

No single trait or class of traits, however fundamental 
may be its importance, can be admitted as a definite criterion 
by which the character of a language shall be judged, and its 
rank determined. We saw reason above to challenge the 
absolute superiority of the inflective principle, strongly as it 
may indicate a valuable tendency in language-making. Cer- 
tainly it is wholly conceivable that some language of the 
agglutinative class may decidedly surpass in strength and 
suppleness, in adaptedness to its use as the instrument and 
aid of thought, some other language or languages of the in- 
flective class. Not morphological character alone is to be 
taken account of ; for not every race of equal mental endow- 
ment has originated and shaped a language, any more than 
an art, of equivalent formal merit. Some one needed item 
of capacity was wanting, aud the product remains unartistic ; 
or the work of the earliest period, which has determined the 
grand features of the whole after-development, was un- 
adroitly performed ; the first generations left to their suc- 
cessors a body of constraining usages and misguiding 
analogies, the influence of which is not to be shaken off ; and 
the mental power of the race is shown by the skill and force 
with which it wields an imperfect instrument, Many a 
tongue thus stands higher, or lower, in virtue of the sum of 
its qualities, than its morphological character would naturally 
indicate. The Chinese is one of the most striking instances 
of such a discordance; though so nearly formless, in a mor- 
phological sense, it is nevertheless placed by Wilhelm von 
WTumboldt and Steinthal * in their higher class of “form 
languages,” along with the Indo-European and Semitic, as 
being a not unsuitable incorporation of clear logical thought ; 
as, though not distinctly indicating relations and categories, 
yet not cumbering their conception, their mental appre- 
hension, by material adjuncts which weaken and confuse the 
thought. 

* See the latter’s Charakteristik etc., pp. 70, 327. 


368 CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES [LEOT, 


But further, apart from this whole matter of morphologi- 
eal form, of grammatical structure, of the indication, expressed 
or implied, of relations, another department contributes 
essentially to our estimate of the value of a language: 
namely, its material content, or what is signified by its 
words. The universe, with all its objects and their qualities, 
is put before the language-makers to be comprehended and 
expressed, and the different races, and tribes, and communi- 
ties, have solved the problem after a very different fashion. 
Names-giving implies not merely the distinction of individual 
things, but, no less, classification and analysis, in every kind, 
and of every degree of subtlety. There are conceptions, 
and classes of conceptions, of so obvious and practical cha- 
racter, that their designations are to be found in every lan- 
guage that exists or ever has existed: there are hosts of 
others which one community, or many, or the most, have 
never reached. Does a given tongue show that the race 
which speaks it has devoted its exclusive attention to the 
more trivial matters in the world without and within us, or 
has it apprehended higher things? Has it, for example, so 
studied and noted the aspects of nature that it can describe 
them in terms of picturesque power? Has it distinguished 
with intellectual acuteness and spiritual insight the powers 
aud operations of our internal nature, our mind and soul, so 
that it can discuss psychological questions with significance 
and precision? Any dialect, isolating or inflective, mono- 
syllabic or polysynthetic, may be raised or lowered in the 
scale of languages by the characteristics which such inquiries 
bring to light. In these, too, there is the widest diversity, 
depending on original capacity, on acquired information and 
civilization, and on variety of external circumstance and con- 
dition—a diversity among different branches of the same 
race, different periods of the same history, and, where culture 
and education introduce their separating influences, between 
different classes of the same community. Our earliest 
inquiries (in the first three lectures) into the processes of 
linguistic growth showed us, that the changes which bring 
about this diversity, the accretions to the vocabulary of a 
tongue, the deepening of the meaning of its words, are the 


» 3 BY THEIR COMPARATIVE VALUE. 569 


easiest of all to make, the most pervading and irrepressible 
in their action, throughout every period of its existenco. 
Here, then, more than in any other department, it is practi- 
eable for later generations to amend and complete the work 
of earlier; and yet, such is the power of linguistic habit 
that, even here, original infelicities sometimes adhere to a 
language during its whole development. 

To make out a satisfactory scheme of arrangement for all 
human tongues upon the ground of their comparative value, 
accordingly, will be a task of extreme difficulty, and one of 
the last results reached by linguisti+ science It will require 
a degree of penetration into the inmost secrets of structure 
and usage, an acuteness of perception and freedom from 
prejudice in estimating merits of diverse character, and a 
breadth and reach of learning, which will be found attainable 
only by a few master-minds. Great play is here afforded 
for subjective views, for inherited prepossessions, for sway of 
mental habits. Who of us can be trusted fairly to compare 
the advantages of his own and of any other language P 

There can be no question that, of all the modes of classif- 
eation with which linguistic scholars have had to do, the one 
of first and most fundamental importance is the cenetical, or 
that which groups together, and holds apart from others, 
languages giving evidence of derivation from the samo 
original, It underlies and furnishes the foundation of all the 
remaining modes. There can be no tie between any two 
dialects so strong as that of a common descent. Every 
great family has a structural character of its own, whereby, 
whatever may be the varying development of its members, 
it is made a unit, and more or less strikingly distinguished 
from the rest. Whatever other criterion we may apply is 
analogous in its character and bearings with the distinction 
of apetalous, monopetalous, and polypetalous, or of monogy- 
nous, digynous, ete., or of exogenous and endogenous, or of 
phenogamous and eryptogamous, in the science of botany— 
all of them possessing real importance in different degrees, 
variously crossing one another, and marking out certain 
general divisions; while the arrangement of linguistie 
families corresponds with the division of plants into natural 

24 


370 LINGUISTIC AND PHYSICAL [ LECT. 


orders, founded upon a consideration of the whole com} licate 
structure of the things classified, contemplating the sum of 
their characteristic qualities ; fixing, therefore, their position 
ia the vast kingdom of nature of which they are members, and 
determining the names by which they shall be called. The 
genetical classification is the ultimate historical fact which 
the historical method of linguistic study directly aims at 
establishing. With its establishment are bound up those 
more general historical results, for the ethnological history 
of mankind, which form so conspicuous a part of the interest 
of our science. 

To subjects connected with this department of interest, 
the bearing of linguistic science on ethnology, we have next 
to turn our attention, occupying with them the remainder of 
the present lecture. 

One of the first considerations which will be apt to strike 
the notice of any one who reviews our classification of human 
races according to the relationship of their languages, is its 
non-agreement with the current divisions based on physical 
characteristics. The physicists, indeed, are far from having 
yet arrived at accordance in their own schemes of classifica- 
tion, and the utter insufficiency of that old familiar distine- 
tion of Caucasian, Mongol, Malay, African, and American, 
established by Blumenbach, and probably learned by most of 
us at school, is now fully recognized. But it does not seem 
practicable to lay down any system of physical races which 
shall agree with any possible scheme of linguistic races. 
Indo-European, Semitic, Scythian, and Caucasian tongues 
are spoken by men whom the naturalist would not separate 
from one another as of widely diverse stock; and, on the 
other hand, Scythian dialects of close and indubitable rela- 
tionship are in the mouths of peoples who differ as widely in 
form and feature as Hungarians and Lapps; while not less 
discordance of physical type is to be found among the 
speakers of various dialects belonging to more than one of 
the other great linguistic families. 

Such facts as these call up the question, as one of high 
practical consequence, respecting the comparative value of 
linguistic and of physical evidence of race, and how their 


x.] EVIDENCE OF RAOE. 371 


seeming discrepancy is to be reconciled. Some method of 
bringing about a reconciliation between them must evidently 
be sought and found. For neither linguistic nor physical 
ethnology is a science of classification merely ; both claim toe 
be historical also. Both are working toward the same end: 
sxamely, a tracing out of the actual connection and gene- 
alogical history of human races; and, though each must 
follow its own methods, without undue interference from 
without, they cannot labour independently, careless each of 
the other’s results. To point out the mode of reconciliation, 
to remove the difficulties which lie in the way of harmonious 
agreement between the two departments of ethnological 
science, I shall not here make the least pretence; such a 
result can be attained only when the principles and conclu- 
sions of both are advanced and perfected far beyond their 
present point. All that we can attempt to do is to notice 
certain general considerations bearing upon the subject, and 
requiring not to be lost from sight by either party; and 
especially, to point out the limitations and imperfections of 
both physical and linguistic evidence, and how necessary it 
is that each should modestly solicit and frankly acknowledge 
the aid of the other. 

How language proves anything concerning race, and what 
it does and does not prove, was brought clearly to light in 
the course of our earliest inquiries into its nature and 
history. What we then learned respecting the mode of 
acquisition and transmission of each man’s, and each commu- 
nity’s, “native tongue” was sufficient to show us the total 
error of two somewhat different, and yet fundamentally 
accordant, views of language, which have been put forth and 
defended by certain authorities—the one, that speech is to 
man what his song is to the bird, what their roar, growl, 
bellow are to lions, bears, oxen; and that resemblances of 
dialect therefore no more indicate actual genetic connection 
among different tribes of men than resemblances of uttered 
tone indicate the common descent of various species of 
thrushes, or of bears, inhabiting different parts of the world: 
the other, that language is the immediate and necessary pro- 


duct of physical organization, and varies as this varies; that 
24 * 


O12 VALUE OF LANGUAGE [ LECT. 


an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Chinaman talk unlike 
one another because their brains and organs of articulation 
are unlike; and that all Englishmen talk alike, as do all 
#renchmen, or all Chinamen, because, in consequence of 
their living amid similar physical conditions, and their in- 
heritance of a common race-type, their nervous and muscular 
systems minutely correspond. And doctrines akin with 
these are more or less distinctly and consciously implied in 
the views of those who hold that language is beyond the 
reach of the free-agency of men, and can be neither made 
nor changed by human effort. All who think thus virtually 
deny the. existence of such a thing as linguistic science, or 
reduce it to the position of a subordinate branch of physi- 
ology: speech becomes a purely physical characteristic, one 
among the many which by their common presence make up 
man, and by their differences distinguish the different 
varieties of men; and it would be for the physicist to deter- 
mine, here, as in the case of other physical characteristics, 
how far its joint possession indicated specific unity, or how 
far its diversities of kind indicated specific variety. All 
these false theories are brushed away at once by our recogni- 
tion of the fact that we do not produce our speech from 
within, but acquire it from without ourselves; that we 
neither make nor inherit the words we use, whether of our 
native tongue or of any other, but learn them from our 
instructors. 

But from this it also follows that no individual’s speech 
directly and necessarily marks his descent ; it only shows in 
what community he grew up. Language is no infallible 
sign of race, but only its probable indication, and an indica- 
tion of which the probability is exposed to very serious draw- 
backs. For it is evident that those who taught us to speak, 
of whose means of expression we learned to avail ourselves, 
need not have been of our own kith and kin. Not only 
may individuals, families, groups of families, of almost every 
race on earth, be, as at present in America, turned into and 
absorbed by one great community, and made to adopt its 
speech, but a strange tongue may be learned by whole tribes 
and nations of those who, like our negroes, are brought 


x.] AS EVIDENCE OF RACE, 75 


° 


away frem their native homes, or, like the Irish, have lived 
long under a foreign yoke, or, like the Celts of ancient Gaul 
and Spain, have received laws, civilization, and religion from 
another and a superior race. Languages unnumbered and 
innumerable have disappeared from off the face of the earth 
since the beginning of human history; but only in part by 
reason of the utter annihilation of the individuals who had 
spoken them; more often, doubtless, by their dispersion, and 
incorporation with other communities, of other speech. 
Everywhere, too, where the confines of different forms of 
speech meet, there goes on more or less of mixture between 
them, or of effacement of the one by the other. Yet, on the 
other hand, mixture of language is not necessary proof of 
mixture of race. We can trace the genesis of a very large 
part of our own vocabulary to the banks of the Tiber, but 
hardly the faintest appreciable portion of our ancestry is 
Roman. We obtained our Latin words in the most strangely 
roundabout way: they were brought us by certain Germanic 
adventurers, the Normans, who had learned them from a 
mixed people, the French, chiefly of Celtic blood ; and these, 
again, had derived them from another heterogeneous com- 
pound of Italican races, among whom the Latin tribe was 
numerically but a feeble element. 

Of such nature are the difficulties in the way of our infer- 
ring the race-connections of an individual or of a community 
with certainty from the relations of the language which 
either speaks. They are of undeniable force and importance, 
and must be borne constantly in mind by every one who is 
pursuing investigations, and laying down conclusions, in lin- 
guistic ethnology. They drive him to seek after some other 
concurrent test of descent, which shall serve to check and 
control his own results; and they make him court and 
welcome the aid of the physicist, as well as of the archzolo- 
gist and the historian. 

But, notwithstanding this, their consequence, and their 
power to invalidate linguistic evidence, must not be over- 
rated. They concern, after all, what in the grand sum of 
human history are the exceptions to a general rule. It still 
remains true that, upon the whole, language is a tolerably 


74 MIXTURE AND [ LECT, 


sure irdication of race. Since the dawn of time, those 
among whom individuals were born, of whom they learned 
how to express their mental acts, have been usually of their 
own blood. Nor do these difficulties place linguistic evidence 
at any marked disadvantage as compared with physical. 
They are, to no small extent, merely the effect, on the side of 
language, of the grand fact which comes in constantly to 
interfere with ethnological investigations of every kind: 
namely, that human races do not maintain themselves in 
purity, that men of different descent are all the time min- 
gling, mixing their blood, and crossing all their race-charac- 
teristics. Fusion and replacement of languages are impossi- 
ble, except when men of different native speech are brought 
together as members of the same community, so that there 
takes place more or less of an accompanying fusion of races 
also; and then the resulting language stands at least a 
chance of being a more faithful and intelligible witness of 
the mixture than the resulting physical type. That the 
modern French people, for example, is made up of a congeries 
of Celtic, Germanic, and Italican elements is to a certain 
extent—although only the aid of recorded history enables us 
fully to interpret the evidences—testified by the consider- 
able body of Celtic and Germanic words mixed with the 
Latin elements of the French language; but no physicist 
could ever have derived the same conclusion from a study of 
the French type of structure. The physicists claim that there 
may be a considerable infusion of the blood of one race into 
that of another, without perceptible modification of the 
latter’s race-type ; the intruded element, if not continuously 
supplied afresh, is overwhelmed and assimilated by the other 
and predominant one, and disappears: that is to say, as we 
may interpret the claim, its peculiarities are so diluted by 
constant remixture that they become at last imappreciable. 
In any such case, then, traces discoverable in the language 
may point cut what there is no other means of ascertaining. 
It is true that, on the other hand, the spread and propaga- 
tion of a language may. greatly exceed that of the race to 
which it originally belonged, and that the weaker numerical 
element in a composite community may be the one whose 


x.] SPREAD OF LANGUAGES. 375 


dialect becomes the common tongue of all. Thus the Latin 
swept away the primitive tongues of a great part of southern 
and central Europe, and has become mingled with the speech 
of all civilized nations, in the Old world and the New. But 
we are not rashly to infer that such things have happened 
over and over again in the history of the world. We have 
rather to inquire what influences make possible a career like 
that of the Latin, what lends the predominant and assimilat- 
ing force to a single element where many are combined. 
And, as was pointed out in the fourth lecture, we shall find 
that only superior culture and the possession of a literature 
can give to any tongue such great extensibility. The Per- 
sians, the Mongols, have at one period and another exercised 
Sway over an empire not less extensive than the Roman, but 
their languages were never spread far beyond the limits of 
the peoples to which they properly belonged. The German 
tribes, too, conquered in succession nearly every kingdom of 
Europe; but it was only in order to lose themselves and 
their dialects together, almost undiscoverably, in the commu- 
nities and languages into which they entered. Nay, even 
the wide-spread Greek colonies, with the superiority of 
Greek culture to aid them, were not able to make the Greek 
the tongue of many nations. There was an organizing and 
assimilating force in Roman dominion which the world has 
nowhere else seen equalled. And if the career of the Arabic 
furnishes something like a parallel to that of the Latin, it is 
due, not to the sword of Islam, but to the book, and to the 
doctrine and polity which the book enjoined and the sword 
imposed. Since, then, such movements must be connected 
with culture and literature, they cannot but leave their 
record in written history, and find there their explanation. 
Nor could there occur in every region or in every period 
such an inpouring and assimilation of nationalities as is now 
going on among us; it is only possible under the conditions 
of civilized life in the nineteenth century, and the historical 
conditions which have been created here. The wild and 
uncultivated races of the earth generally are simply maintain- 
ing themselves by growth from generation to generation, 
taking in no immigrants, sending out no emigrants. Culture 


376 VALUE OF LANGUAGE [LECT. 


makes an astonishing difference in the circumstances and 
fates of those portions of mankind over which its influence 
is extended, and it would be the height of folly to transfer 
to barbarous races and uncivilized periods of human history 
analogies and conclusions drawn from the history of culti- 
pated. nations and tongues. The farther we go back into the 
night of the past, the greater 1s the probability that the 
limits of race and speech approximately coincide, and that 
mixture of either is accompanied by that of the other. 

And if, in certain circumstances, a race may change its 
tongue, while yet retaining in its physical structure evidence 
of its descent, a race may also undergo a modification of 
physical type, and still offer in its speech plain indications 
of its real kindred. If the talk of our coloured citizens does 
not show that they were brought from Africa, neither do the 
shape and bearing of the Magyars show that they came from 
beyond the Ural, nor those of the Osmanh Turks that their 
cousins are the nomads of the inhospitable plateau of central 
Asia. This is the grand drawback to the cogency of physical 
evidence of race, and it fully counterbalances those which 
affect the cogency of linguistic evidence, rendering the aid 
of the linguist as necessary to the physical ethnologist as is 
the latter’s to the linguistic ethnologist. Physical science 
is as yet far from having determined the kind, the rate, and 
the amount of modification which external conditions, as cli- 
mate and mode of life, can introduce into a race- type; but 
that, within certain undefined limits, their influence is very 
powerful, is fully acknowledged. There is, to be sure, a 
party among zodlogists and “ethnologiats who insist much 
upon the dogma of “fixity of type,” and assert that all hu- 
man races are original; but the general tendency of scien- 
tific opinion is in the other direction, toward the fuller 
admission of variability of species. The first naturalists are 
still, and more than ever, willing to admit that all the differ. 
ences now existing among human races may be the effects 
of variation from a single type, and that it is at least not 
necessary to resort to the hypothesis of different origins in 
order to explain them. In the fact that Egyptian monu. 
ments of more than three theusand years’ antiquity show us 


x.] AS EVIDENCE OF RACE. 309 
human varieties, and canine varieties, bearing the same cha: 
racteristics as at the present day, there is nothing to disturb 
this conclusion ; for, on the one hand, a period of three 
thousand years is coming to be regarded as not including a 
very large part of man’s existence on the earth; and, on the 
other hand, such a fact only proves the persistency which a 
type may possess when fully developed, and is of very coubt- 
ful avail to show the originality of the type. Something 
analogous is to be seen in language. The speech of our rude 
Germanic ancestors of the same remote period, had we au- 
thentic record of it, would beyond question be found to have 
possessed already a general character clearly identifying it 
with Germanic tongues still existing, and sharply sundering 
it from Greek, from Slavonic, from Celtic, and all the other 
Indo-European branches; yet we do not doubt that the 
Germanic type of speech is a derived, a secondary one. In 
settling all these controverted points, in distinguishing be- 
tween original diversity and subsequent variation, in estab- 
lishing a test and scale for the possibilities and the rate of 
physical change, the physical ethnologist will need all the 
assistance which historical investigatious of every kind ean 
furnish him ; and the greater part must come to him from 
the student of language. 

As the Indo-European family of language is that one of 
which the unity, accompapying a not inconsiderable variety 
of physical type in the peoples who speak its dialecta, 
is most firmly established, and as therefore it may natur- 
ally be regarded as furnishing a prominent illustration of 
the bearing of linguistic conditions on physical inquiries 
into the history of man, it is perhaps worth our while to 
refer to a theory respecting Indo-European speech which 
has found of late a few supporters of some note and au- 
thority, and which, if accepted, would altogether deprive it 
of ethnological value. The assertion, namely, is put forth, 
that the apparent unity of the languages of this family is not 
due to a prevailing identity of descent in the nations to 
which they belong, but to the influence of some sinvle tribe, 
whose superior character, capacity, and prowess enabled it 
to impose its linguistic usages on distant and diverse races 


378 INDO-EUROPEAN [ LECT. 


By some it is even assumed that the correspondences of 
words and forms exhibited by the so-called Indo-European 
tongues are not fundamental and pervading, but superficial, 
consisting in scattered particulars only, in such designations 
of objects and conceptions as one race might naturally make 
over into the keeping of another, along with a knowledge of 
the things designated. This assumption, however, the ex- 
positions, and reasonings of our fifth and seventh lectures 
wil have shown to be wholly erroneous: the correspondences 
in question are fundamental and pervading ; they constitute 
an identity which can only be explained by supposing those 
who founded these tongues to have been members together 
of the same community. Others, who know the European 
languages too well to maintain respecting their relations any 
so shallow and untenable theory, yet try to persuade them- 
selves that the analogy of the Latin will sufficiently account 
for their extension over so wide aregion; that, as Etruscans, 
Celts, Iberians, Germans, learned to speak a tongue of 
Roman origin, so the populations of Europe and Asia, of di- 
verse lineage, learned to speak a common Indo-European 
dialect; and that, accordingly, the differences of Greek, 
Sanskrit, Celtic, and Slavonic are parallel to those of Italian, 
French, and Spanish. But this theory, though more plausible 
and defensible than the other, is hardly less untenable. It 
exhibits a like neglect of another class of linguistic prin- 
ciples: of those, namely, which underlie and explain the 
abnormal extension of tongues like the Latin and the Arabic: 
we have more than once had occasion to set them forth 
above. In order to establish an analogy between the history 
of Latin and that of Indo-European speech, and to make the 
former account satisfactorily for the latter, it would be ne- 
cessary to prove, or at least to render probable, the existence 
in a very remote antiquity of those conditions which in 
modern times have been able to give such a career to the 
language of Rome. But, so far as we can at present see, 
there must have been a total lack of the required conditions. 
Force of character, warlike prowess, superiority of inherent 
mental capacity, undeveloped or partially developed, the 
Indo-Europeans may probably have possessed, as compared 


1 


xt] LANGUAGE AND RACE. 379 


with the more aboriginal races of Europe; but these are not 
the forces which enable the language of a small minority to 
stifle that of the masses of a people and to take its place ; 
if it were so, southern Europe would now be talking Ger- 
manic instead of Romanic dialects. The rude beginnings of 
a higher civilization, as metals, instruments, seeds, domestic 
animals, arts, may possibly have been theirs; yet even these 
would merely engraft upon the languages of the peoples to 
whom they were made known certain words and phrases, 
Only the resources of an enlightened culture, supplemented 
by letters, literature, and instruction, could give to any 
tongue the expansive force demanded by the theory we are 
considering ; and of these, it is needless to say, u0 traces 
are to be found in Indo-European antiquity. We have no 
good ground, then, for doubting that the great extension of 
the languages of our family was effected by the usual causes 
which act among uncultivated tongues: that is to say, 
mainly by the growth, spread, and emigration of a single 
race; by its occupancy of ever new territory, accompanied 
with the partial destruction and partial expulsion, sometimes 
also with the partial incorporation and absorption, of the 
former inhabitants; the element of population which in- 
herited the speech and institutions of the original Indo- 
European tribe being ever the predominant one in each new 
community that was formed. How many fragments of other 
races may have been worked in during the course of the 
family’s migrations—how far the purity of blood of one or 
another of its branches or sub-branches may have been thus 
affected by successive partial dilutions, so that some of their 
present peculiarities of type are attributable to the mixture— 
is, of course, a legitimate matter for inquiry, and one upon 
which we may even look for information from their lan- 
guages, when these shall have been more narrowly examined, 
But upon the whole, in the light of our present knowledge, 
we are justified in regarding the boundaries of Indo-European 
speech as approximately coinciding with those of a race; the 
tie of language represents a tie of blood. 

If the limitations and imperfections of the two kinds of 
evidence are thus in certain respects somewhat evenly bal- 


380 VALUE OF LANGUAGE [ LECT. 


anced, there are others in which linguistie evidence has a 
decidedly superior practical value and availability. The 
differences of language are upon a scale almost infinitely 
ereater than those of physical structure. They are equal in 
their range and variety to those found in the whole animal 
kingdom, from the lowest organisms to the highest, instead 
of being confined within the limits of the possible variation 
of a single species. Hence they can be much more easily 
and accurately apprehended, judged, and described. Lin- 
guistic facts admit of being readily collected, laid down with 
authentic fidelity, and compared coolly, with little risk of 
error from subjective misapprehension. They are accessible 
to a much greater number of observers and investigators. 
Exceptional capacity, special opportunity, and a very long 
period of training, are needed to make a reliable and author- 
itative describer of race-characteristics. It is true that to 
distinguish from one another very diverse types, like the 
European and African, is a task which presents no difficulty. 
But, though we should all, in nine cases out of ten, recog- 
nize a native of Ireland at sight, who among us could trust 
himself to make a faithful and telling description of the ideal 
Trishman, such that, by its aid, a person net already by long 
experience made familiar with the type would recognize it 
when met with? The peculiarities of the native Mish 
dialect, however, are capable of being made unmistakably 
plain to even the duliest apprehension. A few pages or 
phrases, often even a few words, brought back by a traveller 
or sojourner in distant lands from some people with which 
he has made acquaintance, are likely to be worth vastly more 
for fixing their place in the human family than the most 
elaborate account he can give of their physical character- 
istics. Photography, with its utter truth to nature, can 
now be brought in as a most valuable aid to physical de- 
scriptions, yet cannot wholly remove the difficulty, giving 
such abundant illustration as shall enable us to analyze and 
separate that which is national and typical from that which 
is individual and accidental. This last, indeed, is one of the 
marked difficulties in physical investigations. ‘T'wo persons 
may readily be culled from two diverse races who shall be 


x.] AS EVIDENCE OF RAOR. 381 


less unlike than two others that may be chosen from the 
same race. While, on the contrary, words and phrases 
taken down from the lips of an individual, or written or en- 
graved by one hand, can be no private possession ; they must 
belong to a whole community. 

The superior capacity of the remains of language to cast 
light upon the affinities of races needs only to be illustrated 
by an instance or two. What could have impregnably 
established the ethnological position of the ancient Persians 
like the decipherment of the inscriptions of Darius and his 
successors, which show that they spoke a dialect so nearly 
akin with those of Bactria and India that it can be read by 
the latter’s aid P What could exhibit the intimate mixture 
of races and cultures in the valley of the Euphrates and 
Tigris, and the presence there of an important element which 
was neither Indo-European nor Semitic, except the trilingual 
inscriptions of the Mesopotamian monuments? What a 
pregnant fact in African ethnology will be, if fully and irre- 
fragably proved, the relationship of the Hottentot dialects 
with the ancicnt Egyptian! What but the preserved frag- 
ments of their speech could have taught us that the Etrus- 
cans had no kindred with any other of the known races 
inhabiting Europe? And when would physical science ever 
have made the discovery that the same thing is true of the 
Basques, whom yet it has all the opportunity which it could 
desire to study ? But the most important of the advantages 
belonging to linguistie science, in its relation to ethnology, 
is that to which allusion was made at the very outset of our 
discussions: namely, that language tells so much more re- 
specting races thai lies within the reach or scope of the 
physicist. In every part and particle, it is instinet with 
history. It is a picture of the internal life of the community 
to which it belongs ; in it their capacities are exhibited, their 
characters expressed; it reflects their outward circum- 
stances, records theiz experiences, indicates the grade of 
knowledge they have attained, exhibits their manners and 
institutions, Being itself an institution, shaped by their 
consenting though only half-conscious action, it is an im- 
portant test of national endowment and disposition, like 


382 LINGUISTIC AND PHYSICAL ETHNOLOGY. [LECT 


political constitution, like jural usage, like national art. 
Even where it fails to show strict ethnic descent, it shows 
race-history of another sort—the history of the influence 
which, by dint of superior character and culture, certain 
races have exercised over others. The spread of the Latin 
has swept away and obliterated some of the ancient land- 
marks of race, but it has done so by substituting another 
unity for that of descent ; its present ubiquity illustrates 
the unparalleled importance of Rome in the history of hu- 
manity. . 
For these reasons, and such as these, the part which lan- 
guage has to perform in constructing the unwritten history 
of the human race must be the larger and more important. 
There are points which physical science alone ean reach, or 
upon which her authority is superior: but in laying out and 
filling up the general scheme, and especially in converting 
what would else be a barren classification into something 
like a true history, the work must chiefly be done by lin- 
guistic science. , 
The consi'erations we have been reviewing will, it is 
hoped, guide us to a correct apprehension of the relations of 
these two branches of ethnological study. Discord between 
them, question as! to respective rank, there is or should be 
none. Both are legitimate and necessary methods of ap- 
proaching the solution of the same intricate and difficult 
question, the origin and history of man on the earth—a 
question of which we are only now beginning to understand 
the intricacy and difficulty, and which we are likely always to 
fall short of answering to our satisfaction. There was a 
time, not many years since, when the structure and history 
of the earth-crust were universally regarded as a simple 
matter, the direct result of a few fiats, succeeding one an- 
other within the space of six days and nights: now, even 
the school-boy knows that in the brief story of the Genesis 
are epitomized the changes and developments of countless 
ages, and that geology may spend centuries in tracing them 
out and describing them in detail, without arriving at the 
end of her task. In like manner has it been supposed that 
the first introduction of man into the midst of the prepared 


x. | QUESTION OF UNITY OF HUMAN RACK. 883 


creation was distant but six or seven thousand years from 
our day, and we have hoped to be able to read the record 
of so brief a career, even back to its beginning; but science 
is accumulating at present so rapidly, and from so many 
quarters, proofs that the time must be greatly lengthened 
out, and even perhaps many times multiplied, that this new 
modification of a prevailing view seems likely soon to win 
as general an acceptance as the other has already done. And 
the different historical sciences are seeing more and more 
clearly their weakness in the presence of so obscure a pro- 
blem, and confessing their inability to give categorical an- 
swers to many of the questions it involves. 

Such a confession on the part of linguistic science, 
with reference to one point of the most fundamental interest 
and importance in human history, it next devolves upon us 
to make. 

A second question, namely, which cannot but press itself 
upon our attention, in connection with the survey we have 
taken of the grand divisions of human speech, is this: What is 
the scope and bearing of the division into families 2 Does 
it separate the human race into so many different branches, 
which must have been independent from the very beginning ? 
Does linguistic science both fail to find any bond of connee- 
tion between the families and see that no such bond exists ? 
Or, in short, what has the study of language to say respect- 
ing the unity of the human race ? 

This is an inquiry to which, as I believe, the truths we 
have established respecting the character and history of lan- 
guage will enable us readily to find a reply. But that reply 
will be only a negative one, Linguistic science is not now, 
and cannot hope ever to be, in condition to give an author- 
itative opinion respecting the unity or variety of our species. 
This is not an acknowledgment which any student of lan- 
guage likes to make; it may seem to savour, too, of pre- 
cipitation on the part of him who makes it; of a lack of 
faith in the future of his science—a science which, although 
it has already accomplished so much, has yet confessedly 
only begun its career. That those linguistie scholars—for 
such there are—are over-hasty and over-credulous whe sup- 


884 LANGUAGE INCAPABLE OF PROVING [ LECT. 


pose themselves to have proved alrealy, by the evidence of 
language, that all mankind are akin by blood as well as by 
nature, will be conceded by many who are yet unwilling 
to give up all hope of seeing the proof one day satisfactorily 
made out. Let us, then, enter into a brief examination of 
the point, and a consideration of the grounds upon which is 
founded the view we have taken. 

To show, in the first place, that linguistic science can 
never claim to prove the ultimate variety of human races 
will be no long or difficult task. That science, as we have 
seen, regards language as something which has grown up, in 
the manner of an institution, from weak and scanty begin- 
nings; it is a development out of germs; it started with 
simple roots, bricf in form and of indeterminate meaning, 
by the combination of which words came later into being. 
And the existing differences of speech among men are, at 
least to a very considerable extent, the result, not of original 
diversity, but of discordant growth. New we cannot pre- 
sume to set any limits to the extent to which languages once 
the same may have grown apart from one another. It mat- 
ters not what opinion we may hold respecting the origin of 
the first germs of speech: if we suppose them to have been 
miraculously created and placed in the mouths of the first 
ancestors of men, their present differences would not justify 
us in believing that different sets must have been imparted 
to different pairs, or groups, of ancestors ; for the same in- 
fluences which have so obscured the common descent of 
English, We]sh, and Hindustani, for example, may, by an 
action more prolonged or more intense, have transformed 
germs originally common beyond even the faintest possibility 
of recognition. And if, on the other hand, we regard them 
as originated by the same agency which has brought about 
their later combinations and mutations, by men, namely, 
using legitimately and naturally the faculties with which 
they have been endowed, under the guidance of the instincts 
and impulses implanted in them—and no linguist, certainly, 
as such, has any right to deny at least the possibility of this 
origin of languuge—then the case is yet clearer. For we 
cannot venture to say how long a time the formation of. 


x.] DIVERSITY OF HUMAN RACES. 385 


roots may have demanded, or during what period universal 
language may have remained nearly stationary in this its 
inceptive stage. It is entirely conceivable that the earliest 
human race, being one, should have parted into disjoined 
and thenceforth disconnected tribes before the formation of 
any language so far developed and of so fixed forms as to be 
able to leave traceable fragments in the later dialects of the 
sundered portions. These possibilities preclude all dogmatie 
assertion of the variety of human species on the part of the 
linguist.. Among all the known forms of speech, present 
and past, there are no discordances which are not, to his ap- 
prehension, fully reconcilable with the hypothesis of unity 
of race, allowing the truth of that view of the nature and 
history of speech which is forced upon him by his researches 
into its structure. It is certain that no one, upon the 
ground of linguistic investigations alone, will ever be able to 
bear witness against the descent of all mankind from a single 
pair. 

That no one, upon the same grounds, can ever bear wit- 
ness in favour of such descent is, as it appears to me, equally 
demonstrable, although not by so simple and direct an argu- 
ment, and although the opinions of eminent authorities are 
at variance upon the point, and may fairly continue to be 
so for some time to come, until more of the fundamental 
facts and principles in linguistic science shall have been 
firmly established and universally accepted than is the case 
at present. We have here no theoretical impossibility to 
rely upon; no direct argument from necessary conditions, 
cutting off all controversy. As the linguist is compelled to 
allow that a unique race may have parted into branches be- 
fore the development of abiding germs of speech, so he must 
also admit the possibility that the race may have clung to- 
gether so long, or the development of its speech have been 
so rapid, that, even prior to its separation, a common dialect 
had been elaborated, the traces of which no lapse of time, 
with all its accompanying changes, could entirely obliterate, 
Nay, he was bound to keep that possibility distinctly before 
his mind in all his researches, to cherish a hope of making 


language prove community of blood in all members of the 
26 


386 UNCERTAINTIES OF [LEC2, 


human family, until conscientious study should show the 
hope to be groundless. The question was one of fact, of 
what existing and accessible testimony was competent to 
prove; it was to be settled only by investigation. But L 
elaim that investigation, limited as its range and penetration 
have hitherto confessedly been, has already put us in con- 
dition to declare the evidence incompetent, and the thesis 
incapable of satisfactory proof. 

In order to make clear the justice of this claim, it will be 
necessary to recapitulate some of the results we have won in 
our previous discussions, 

The processes of change which are constantly at work in 
language, altering both the form and the meaning of its con- 
stituent words, were set forth and illustrated with sufficient 
fulness in our early lectures. The degree of alteration which 
they may effect, and the variety of their results, are practically 
unlimited. As they can bring utter apparent diversity out 
of original identity, so they can impress an apparent simi- 
larity upon original diversity. Hence the difficulties which 
beset etymological science, its abuse by the unlearned and 
incautious, the occasional seeming arbitrariness and violence 
of its procedures, even in skilled and scientific hands, 
Voltaire’s witty saying, that in etymologizing the vowels are 
of no account at all, and the consonants of very little—to 
which he might have added, that the meaning is equally a 
matter of indifference—was true enough as regarded the 
science of his day ; but we must also confess that in a certain 
way it possesses an applicability to that of our own times. 
Even modern etymology acknowledges that two words can 
hardly be so different, in form or in meaning, or in both form 
and meaning, that there is not a possibility of their being 
proved descendants of the same word: any sound, any shade 
of idea, may pass by successive changes into any other. The 
difference between the old hap-hazard style of etymologizing 
and the modern scientific method lies in this: that the latter, 
while allowing everything to be theoretically possible, ac- 
cepts nothing as actual which is not proved such by sufficient 
evidence; it brings to bear upon each individual case a wide 
circle of related facts; it imposes upon the student the ne. 


x] ETYMOLOGICAL RESEARCHES. 387 


cessily of extended comparison and cautious deduction; it 
makes him careful to inform himself as thoroughly as circum. 
stances allow respecting the history of every word he deals 
with. 

Two opposing possibilities, therefore, interfere with the 
directness of the etymologist’s researches, and cast doubt on 
his conclusions. On the one hand, forms apparently un- 
connected may turn out to be transformations of the same 
original: since, for example, the French évégue and the 
English bishop, words which have no common phonetic con- 
stituent, are yet both descended, within no very long time, 
from the Greek episkopos; since our alms comes from the 
Greek eleémosuné; since our sister and the Persian xahar 
are the same word; since the Latin filius has become in 
Spanish hyo; and so on. On the other hand, what is of not 
less importance in its bearing upon the point we are con- 
sidering, he must be equally mindful that an apparent coin- 
cidence between two words which he is comparing may be 
accidental and superficial only, covering radical diversity. 
How easy it is for words of different origin to arrive ata 
final identity of form, as the result of their phonetic changes, 
is evident enough from the numerous homonyms in our own 
language, to which we have more than once had occasion to 
refer. Thus, sownd in “safe and sound” comes from one 
Germanic word, and sound in “Long Island Sound” from 
another; while sownd, ‘noise,’ is from the Latin sonus. So 
we have a page of a book from the Latin pagina, and a page 
in waiting from the Greek paidion, ‘a little boy ;’ wo have 
cleave, ‘ to stick together,’ from the Anglo-Saxon clifian, and 
cleave, ‘to part asunder,’ from the Anglo-Saxon clufun ; 
and numberless other instances of the same kind. Fortuitous 
coincidences of sound like these, in words of wholly independ. 
ent derivation, are not less liable to occur between the 
vocables of different languages than between those of the 
same language ; and they do so occur. It is, further, by no 
means infrequently the case that, along with a coincidence, 
or a near correspondence, or a remoter analogy, of sound, 
there is also an analogy, or correspondence, or coincidence, 
of meaning—one so nearly resembling that which would be 

25 * 


388 CHANCE CORRESPONDENCES IN [LEcT. 


the effect of a genetic relationship between the two words 
compared as to give us an impression that they must be re- 
lated, when in fact they are not. Resemblances of this sort, 
of every degree of closeness, do actually appear in abundance 
among languages related and unrelated, demonstrably as the 
result of accident alone, being mistaken for signs of genetic 
connection only by incompetent or heedless inquirers. 
Thus, an enterprising etymologist, turning over the pages of 
his Hebrew lexicon, discovers that the Hebrew root kophar 
means ‘cover;’ and he is at once struck with this plain 
proof of the original identity of Hebrew and English: 
whereas, if he only looks a little into the history of the 
English word, he finds that it comes, through the Old French 
covrir, from the Latin codperire, made up of con and operwre ; 
which latter is gotten, by two or three steps of derivation 
and composition, from a root par, ‘ pass :’ and this puts 
upon him the necessity, either of giving up his fancied 
identification, or of making out some degree of probability 
that the Hebrew word descended, through a like succession 
of steps, from a like original. Another word-genealogist 
finds that Jars in ancient Etruscan meant ‘a chief, a head 
man,’ and he parades it as an evidence that the Etruscan 
was, after all, an Indo-European language: for is not lars 
clearly the same with the Scottish word laird, our lord? 
He is simply regardless of the fact that laird and lord are the 
altered modern representatives of the Anglo-Saxon hlaford, 
with which lars palpably has about as little to do as with 
brigadier-general or deputy-sheriff- A Polynesian scholar, 
intent on proving that South-Sea islanders and Europeans 
are tribes of the same lineage, points out the almost exact 
coincidence of the Polynesian mata and the modern Greek 
mati, both signifying ‘eye:’ which is just as sensible as if 
he were to compare a (hypothetical) Polynesian busa, ‘a 
four-wheeled vehicle, with our ’bus (from omnibus) : for 
mati in Greek is abbreviated from ommation, diminutive of 
omma, ‘eye, and has lost its originally significant part, the 
syllable om, representing the root op, ‘see.’ 

These are only a few samples of false etymologies, selected 
from among the thousauds and tens of thousands with which ., 


x. | UNRELATED LANGUAGES. 385 


all linguistic literature, ancient and modern, teems ; which 
have been drawn out, with infinite expenditure of ill-directed 
ingenuity and misapplied labour, from the vocabularies of 
tongues of every age and every clime, There is not one 
among them which has not a much higher primd facie plausi- 
bility than the identity of évégue and bishop, or of jfilius and 
Ayo, or than numberless others of the true etymologies 
established upon sufficient evidence, by the scientifie student 
of languages: but their value is in seeming only ; they are 
baseless and worthless, mere exemplifications of the effects 
wrought by the process we are considering—the process 
which brings out accidental analogies, phonetic and signifi- 
cant, between words historically unrelated. The greater 
portion of false etymologies are to be ascribed directly to its 
influence ; and their number is a sufficient and striking proof 
of the wide extent of its action, the frequency and variety of 
the results it produces. 

The fact is well established, that there are no two lan- 
guages upon the face of the earth, of however discordant 
origin, between which may not be brought to light by dili- 
gent search a goodly number of these false analogies of both 
form and meaning, seeming indications of relationship, which 
a little historical knowledge, when it is to be had, at once 
shows to be delusive, and which have no title to be regarded 
as otherwise, even if we have not the means of proving their 
falsity. It is only necessary to cast out of sight the general 
probabilities against a genetic connection of the languages 
we are comparing (such as their place and period, their 
nearer connections, and the pervading discordance of their 
structure and material), and then to assume between them 
phonetic transitions not more violent than are actnally 
proved to be exhibited by other tongues—and we may find 
a goodly portion of the vocabulary of each hidden in that of 
the other. Dean Swift has ridiculed the folly which amuses 
itself with such comparisons and etymologies, in a well- 
known caricature, wherein he derives the names of ancient 
Greek worthies from honest modern English elements, ex- 
plaining Achilles as ‘a kill-ease, Hector as ‘hacked-tore,’ 
Alexander the Great as ‘all eggs under the grate!’ and se 


B99 CHANCE CORRESPONDENCES IN [Luct. 


on. This is very absurd; and yet, save that the absurdity of 
it is made more palpable to us by being put in terms of our 
own language and another with which we are somewhat 
familiar, it is hardly worse than what has been done, and is 
done, in all sobcrness, by men claiming the name of linguistic 
scholars. It is even now possible for such a man to take an 
African vocabulary, and sit deliberately down to see what 
words of the various cther languages known to him he can 
explain out of it, producing a batch of correspondences like 
these: abetele, ‘a begging beforehand’ (which he himself de- 
fines as composed of a, formative prefix, be, ‘beg,’ and tele, 
‘previously ’), and German betteln, ‘ beg’ (from the simpler 
root bit, bet, our bid) ; idaro, ‘that which becomes collected 
into a mass, and English dross ; basile, ‘landlord’ (6a for 
oba, ‘master, si, ‘of, and ze, ‘land’), and Greek basileus, 
‘king :’ and the comparer, who is specially versed in the 


mathematical doctrine of chances, gravely informs us that 


the chances against the merely accidental character of the 
last coincidence are “at least a hundred million to one.” 
More than one unsound linguist has misled himself and 
others by calculating, in the strictest accordance with mathe- 
matical rules, how many thousand or million cf chances to 
one there are against the same word meaning the same 
thing in two different and unconnected languages. The 
calculation is futile, and its result a fallacy. The relations 
of language are not to be so simply reduced to precise 
mathematical expression. If words were wholly inde- 
pendent entities, instead of belonging to families of connected 
derivatives; if they were of such precise constitution and 
application as so many chemical formulas ; if the things they 
designated were as distinct and separate individualities as 
are fixed stars, or mineral species, or geographical localities— 
then the calculations of chances would be in place respecting 
them. But none of these things are true. The evidences 
on which linguistic science relies to prove genetical connec- 
tion are not identities of form combined with identities of 
meaning: forms may differ as much as hijo and jilius ; 
meanings may differ as much as German bekommen, ‘ get,’ 


and English become, ‘come to be,’ and become, ‘suit ;’ form 


a 


x.] UNRELATED LANGUAGES. 391 


and meaning may differ together to any extent, and yet the 
words may he one and the same, and good evidences of re- 
lationship between the languages to which they respectively 
belong. Not literal agreement, but such resemblances, 
nearer or more distant, clearer or more obscure, as are proved 
by supporting facts to have their ground in original identity, 
make satisfactory evidence of common descent in language. 

Here, then, is the practical difficulty in the way of him 
who would prove all human speech a unit. On the one 
hand, those fortuitous coincidences and analogies which any 
given language may present with any other with which it is 
compared form a not inconsiderable body, an appreciable 
percentage of its general stock of words. On the other 
hand, the historical coincidences and analogies traceable be- 
tween two languages of common descent are capable of sink- 
ing to as low, or even to a lower, percentage of its vocabu- 
lary. That is to say, there may be two related tongues, the 
genuine signs of whose relationship shall be iass numerous 
and conspicuous than the apparent but delusive signs of 
relationship of two others which derive themselves from inde- 
pendent origins. The former have been so long separated 
from one another, their changes in the mean time have been 
so pervading, that their inherited points of resemblance are 
reduced in number and obscured in character, until they are 
no longer sufficient to create a reasonable presumption in 
favour of their own historical reality ; they are undistin- 
guishable from the possible results of chance. As we saw 
in the sixth lecture (p. 243), evidences of genetic connection 
are cumulative in their character ; no single item of corre- 
spondence is worth anything until there are found kindred 
facts to support it ; and its force is strengthened with every 
new accession. And, in the comparison of languages, the 
point is actually reached where it becomes impossible to tell 
whether the few coincidences which we discover are the 
genuine traces of a community of linguistic tradition, or onl y 
accidental, and evidence of nothing. When we come to 
holding together the forms of speech belonging to the diverse 
families, linguistic testimony fails us: it no longer has force 
to prove anything to our satisfaction. 


392 FUTILITY OF COMPARISONS [1.EcT. 


To demonstrate that this is so, we do not need to enter 
into a detailed examination of two tongues claimed to be 
unrelated, and show that their correspondences fall incontest- 
ably short of the amount required to prove relationship: we 
may take a briefer and directer argument. We have seen 
that the established linguistic families are made up of those 
dialects which exhibit traceable signs of a common historic 
development ; which have evidently grown together out of 
the radical stage (unless, as in the case of the monosyllabic 
tongues, they have together remained stationary in that 
stage) ; which possess, at least in part, the same grammatical 
structure. There are some linguistic scholars who cherish 
the sanguine hope that trustworthy indications of this kind 
of correspondence may yet be pointed out between some two 
or three of the great families; but no one whose opinion is 
of one straw’s weight thinks of such a thing with reference 
to them all. So discordant is the whole growth of many of 
the types of speech that we can find no affinities among them 
short of their ultimate beginnings: if all human speech is to 
be proved of one origin, it can only be by means of an identi- 
fication of roots. To give the investigation this form, how- 
ever, is virtually to abandon it as hopeless. The difficulties 
in the way of a fruitful comparison of roots are altogether 
overwhelming. To trace out the roots of any given family, 
in their ultimate form and primitive signification, is a task 
whose gravity the profoundest investigators of language are 
best able to appreciate. Notwithstanding the variety of the 
present living dialects of the Indo-European family, and the 
noteworthy preservation of original forms on the part of 
some among them, their comparison would be far enouga 
from furnishing us the radical elements of Indo-European 
speech. Even the aid of the ancient tongues but partially 
removes the difficulty; and, but for the remarkable and 
exceptional character of the Sanskrit, our knowledge of that 
stage in the history of our language out of which its present 
grammatical structure was a cevelopment would be but 
scanty and doubtful; while we have been compelled to 
confess (in the seventh lecture) that we know not how far 


even so primitive a stage may lie from the absolute beginning. ‘ 


| 


x. | OF ULTIMATE ROOTS. 899 


The corresponding condition of Semitic speech, its foundation 
of triliteral roots, is to no small extent restorable; but we 
have seen that these roots are themselves the products of a 
strange and highly perplexing development, beneath which 
their actual origin is not yet discernible. Among the differ- 
ent great branches of the Scythian family, the recognizable 
radical coincidences are hardly sufficient, if they are sufficient, 
to establish their unity as proceeding from the same stock : 
a reliable basis for comparison with other families is certainly 
not furnished us here. Nor was the Scythian the only 
family in establishing whose unity we were obliged to add 
the evidence of morphological structure to that of material 
correspondences: there were at least two, the monosyllabic 
in south-eastern Asia and the American, which were founded 
almost solely on accordance of type. And the former of 
them is a striking illustration of the power of phonetie 
corruption to alter and disguise the bare roots of language, 
without help from composition and fusion of elements. If 
we cannot find material correspondences enough between the 
pure radicals of Chinese, Siamese, and Burmese to prove these 
three tongues akin, but must call in, to aid the conclusion, 
their common characteristic of monosyllabism, what hope can 
we possibly entertain of proving either of them akin with 
Mongolian or Polynesian, for example, with which they have 
no morphological affinity ? Who will be so sanguine as to 
expect to discover, amid the blind confusion of the American 
languages, where there are scores of groups which seem to be 
totally diverse in constituent material, the radical elements 
which have lain at the basis of their common development ? 
Apparent resemblances among apparent roots of the different 
families are, indeed, to be found: but they are wholly worth- 
less as evidences of historical connection. To the general 
presumption of their accidental nature is to be farther added 
the virtual certainty that the elements in which they appear 
are not ultimate roots at all, but the products of recent 
growth. There is nothing, it may be remarked, in the 
character of ultimate roots which should exempt them from 
the common liability to exhibit fortuitous coincidences, but 
rather the contrary. The system of sounds employed in the 


394 FUTILITY OF ROOT-COMPARISONS. 


rudimentary stage of linguistic growth was comparatively 
scanty, the circle of ideas represented by the roots was 
narrow and limited, the application of each root more vague 
and indeterminate; hence accidental analogies of form and 
meaning might even more reasonably be looked for between 
the radical elements of unconnected families than between 
their later developed words. 

For these reasons it is that the comparison of roots is not 
likely to lead to any satisfactory results even in the most 
favourable cases, and* cannot possibly be made fruitful of 
veluable and trustworthy conclusions through the whole 
body of human language. There are, it is true, not a few 
philologists—and among them some authorities deserving of 
the highest respect—who hold that correspondences enough 
have been found between Indo-European and Semitic roots to 
prove the ultimate connection of those two families of lan- 
guaze: bet the number is yet greater of those who regard 
the asserted proof as altogether nugatory. The attempt has 
been made above (in the eighth lecture) to show that the 
governing presumption in the case 1s not a purely linguistie 
one, but rather a historical; and it is one which is quite as 
likely to be weakened as to be strengthened by the results 
of future researches. But, as regards the point now under 
discussion, the admission or rejection of a genetic tie between 
these two particular families, or even between these and the 
Scythian and Chinese, would make no manner of difference : 
there would still remain the impossibility of extending a like 
tie, by linguistic means, to the other great families. 

Our general conclusion, then, which may be looked upon 
as incontrovertibly established, is this: if the tribes of men 
are of different parentage, their languages could not be 
expected to be more unlike than they in fact are; while, on 
the other hand, if all mankind are of one blood, their tongues 
need not be more alike than we actually find them to be. 
The evidence of language can never guide us to any positive 
conclusion respecting the specific unity or diversity cf human 
races. 


LECTURE XI. 


Crigin of language. Conditions of the problem. In what sense lan- 
guage is of divine origin. Desire of communication the immediate 
impulse to its production. Language and thought not identical. 
Thought possible without language. Difference of mental action in 
man and lower animals. Language the result and means of analytic 
thought, the aid of higher thought. The voice as instrument of ex- 
pression. Acts and qualities the first things named. The “bow-wow,” 
“pooh-pooh,” and “ding-dong” theories, Onomatopceia the true 
source of first utterances. Its various modes and limitations. Its 
traces mainly obliterated. Remaining obscurities ‘of the problem, 


In the last lecture, we took up and considered certain 
matters which seemed naturally to present themselves to our 
attention in connection with our survey of the divisions and 
characteristics of human speech. We first examined the 
various systems of classification of languages, according to 
morphological form or to general rank, weighing briefly the 
value of the distinctions upon which they are founded; and 
we arrived at the conclusion that no other mode of classifica. 
tion has anything like the same worth with the genetical, or 
that which groups dialects together by their historical rela- 
tionship. We then passed on to the subject of the general 
relations between linguistic science and ethnology, the 
history of human races. We saw that between the study of 
language and that of physical characteristics, as tests of race, 
there can be no discordance and jealousy, but only an honour- 
able emulation and mutual helpfulness; that each, feeling its 
own limitations and imperfections, needs and seeks the assist- 
ance of the other; claiming, also, all the aid which recorded 


B36 DIFFICULTIES OF THE [LEOR 


history can furnish, and all that can be derived from arche- 
ology, to correct and confirm its conclusions. So intricate 
and difficult of solution is the problem set before us in the 
beginnings of history, the origin and ultimate connections of 
races, that, as we have good reason to fear, our utmost efforts, 
our most cunning combinations of all attainable evidence, 
from whatever sources derived, will never bring us to a dis- 
tinct and confident answer. For a little way, history and 
tradition are our chief guides; then, the study of language 
conducts us somewhat farther, although with feebler and 
more uncertain steps; while physical science claims to give 
us a few glimpses, we know not yet of what reach or sweep, 
into a still remoter past. And as, in investigations of this 
trying character, it is of no small consequence to know what 
are the limits and defects of the evidence with which we are 
dealing, that we may not waste our strength, and prepare 
for ourselves bitter disappointment, by searching for conclu- 
sions where none can possibly be found, we entered upon an 
inquiry as to whether it was within the province of linguistic 
science to determine the vexed question of the unity or 
multiplicity of the human race; and we found that this was 
not the case. The beginnings of language, in at least a part 
of the recognized families of languages, are too much covered 
up and hidden under the products of later growth for our eyes 
ever to distinguish them with any even tolerable approach to 
certainty ; and the correspondences which have been already, 
or may be hereafter, pointed out between the linguistic 
material of different languages, now reckoned as belonging to 
diverse families, may be so plausibly explained as the effects 
of chance that they can never be accepted as the sure result 
and sign of a common linguistic tradition. Our conclusion 
here was, that human languages might well have become as 
different as we now find them to be, even though all of them 
descended from the rudimentary and undeveloped dialect of 
some single original family or tribe ; while, on the other hand, 
considering the acknowledged unity in diversity of human 
nature, we should not expect to find languages any more un- 
like than they actually are, if there had been a separate Adam 
and Eve for each one of a dozen or more human races. 


x1.] ETHNOLOGICAL PROBLEM. B07 


Whether physical science will ever reach a more definite 
decision of the same question is at present, at least, very 
doubtful : its tendency seems now to be toward establishing 
such a capacity of mutation in species as would explain all 
the tribes of men as possible varieties of one type ; without, 
of course, at the same time disproving the possibility of their 
independent origin. It is likely enough that we may, at 
some time, reach a point where we shall be able to say that, 
upon the whole, the weight of probability is upon this side, 
or upon that: anything more certain and categorical we can 
hardly venture to look for. Happily, the question is one of 
little practical consequence: the brotherhood of men, the 
obligation of mutual justice and mutual kindness, rests upon 
the possession of a common nature and a common destiny, 
not upon the tie of fleshly relationship. Those who would 
justify their oppression of a whole race of their fellow-beings 
by an alleged proof of its descent from other ancestors 
than their own are not less perverse—more perverse they 
could not well be—than those who would sanctify it as the 
execution of a curse pronounced by a drunken patriarch upon 
a portion of his own offspring. It is as shameful to attempt 
to press science as religion into the service of organized 
injustice. 

But if linguistic science must thus observe a modest 
silence with regard to the origin of the human race, what has 
it to say respecting the origin of language itself? This is 
an inquiry to which we have made a near approach at one 
and another point in our discussions hitherto, but which we 
have carefully refrained from grappling with seriously. It 
has not lain in the direct line of our investigations. We 
have been engaged in analyzing and examining the recorded 
facts of language, in order to find what answer we could to 
our leading question, “why we speak as we do?” and we 
have been brought at last to the recognition of certain ele- 
ments called roots, which we clearly see to have been the 
germs whence the whole development of speech has proceeded, 
but which we do not dare affirm to-hayve been absolutely the 
first utterances of speaking men. These, then, are the 
nistorical beginnings of speech ; and historical research wilh 


398 ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE; [ LECT, 


take us no farther. The question as to what were the actual 
first utterances, and how they were produced, must be decided, 
if at all, in another way 
ogies, by inferences from the facts of human nature and the 
facts of language, taken together, and from their relations to 
one another. It falls within the province rather of linguis- 
tic philosophy, as a branch of anthropology, than of the 
historical science of language. But the subject is one of 
such interest, and for the proper discussion of which our 
historical investigations so directly prepare the way, that we 
cannot refrain from taking it up. It may be that we shall 
find no sharp-cut and dogmatic answer to our inquiries re- 
specting it, but we may hope at least so to narrow down the 
field of uncertainty and conjecture as to leave the problem 
virtually solved. 

We may fairly claim, in the first place, that the subject has 
been very greatly simplified, stripped of no small part of its 
difficulty and mystery, by what has already been proved as 
to the history of speech. Did we find no traces of a primi- 
tive condition of language different from its later manifesta- 
tions, did it appear to us as from the very beginning a com- 
pletely developed apparatus, of complicated structure, with 
distinct signs for objects, qualities, activities, and abstract 
conceptions, with its mechanism for the due expression of 
relations, and with a rich yvocabulary—then might we well 
shrink back in despair from the attempt to explain its origin, 
and confess that only a miracle could have produced it, that 
only a superhuman agency could have placed it in human 
possession. But we have seen that the final perfection of 
the noblest languages has been the result of a slow and 
gradual development, under the impulse of tendencies, and 
through the instrumentality of processes, which are even yet 
active in every living tongue; that all this wealth has grown 
by long accumulation out of an original poverty; and that 
the actual germs of language were a scanty list of formless 
roots, representing a few of the most obvious sensible acts 
and phenomena appearing in ourselves, our fellow-creatures, 
and the nature by which we are surrounded. We have now 
left us only the comparatively easy task of satisfying our. 


x1. ] 18 IT DIVINE? 899 


selves how men should have come into possession of tliese 
humble rudiments of speech. 

And our attention must evidently first be directed to the 
inquiry whether those same inventive and shaping powers of 
man which have proved themselves capable of creating out of 
monosyllabic barrenness the rich abundance of inflective 
speech were not also equal to the task of producing the first 
poor hoard of vocables. There are those who insist much on 
what they are pleased to term the divine origin of language ; 
who think it in some way derogatory to the honour of the 
Creator to deny that he devised roots and words, and, by 
some miraculous and exceptional agency, put them ready- 
made into the mouths of the first human beings. Of such we 
would ask whether, after all, language can be in this sense 
only a divine gift to man; whether the hand of the Creator 
is any the less clearly to be seen, and need be any the less 
devoutly acknowledged, in its production, if we regard man 
himself as having been created with the necessary impulses 
and the necessary capacities for forming language, and then 
as having possessed himself of it through their natural and 
conscious workings. Language, articulate speech, is a 
universal and exclusive characteristic of man: no tribe of 
human kind, however low, ignorant, and brutish, fails to 
speak ; no race of the lower animals, however highly endowed, 
is able to speak: clearly, it was just as much a part of the 
Creator’s plan that we should talk as that we should breathe, 
should walk, should eat and drink. The only question is, 
whether we began to talk in the same manner as we began to 
breathe, as our blood began to circulate, by a process in 
which our own will had no part; or, as we move, eat, clothe 
and shelter ourselves, by the conscious exertion of our 
natural powers, by using our divinely-given faculties for the | 
satisfaction of our divinely-implanted necessities. 

That the latter supposition is fully sufficient to account 
for our possession of speech cannot with any show of reason 
be denied. Throughout its whole traceable history, language 
has been in the hands of those who have spoken it, for mani- 
fold modification, for enrichment, for adaptation to the vary- 
ing ends of a varying knowledge and experience; nineteen 


400 ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE ; [LECT 


twentieths, at the least, of the speech we speak is demonstra. 
bly in this sense our own work: why should the remaining 
twentieth be thought otherwise P It is but a childish philo- 
sophy which can see no other way to make out a divine 
agency in human language than by regarding that agency as 
specially and miraculously efficient in the first stage of form- 
ation of language. We may fairly compare it with the 
wisdom of the little girl who, on being asked who made her, 
replied: “ God made me a little baby so high ” (dropping her 
hand to within a foot of the floor) “and I grew the rest.” 
The power which originates is not to be separated from that 
which maintains and develops: both are one, one in their 
essential nature, one in their general mode of action. We 
might as well claim that the letters of the alphabet, that the 
simple digits, must have been miraculously revealed, for ele- 
ments out of which men should proceed to develop systems 
of writing and of mathematical notation, as that the rudi- 
ments of spoken speech, the primitive signs of mental con- 
ceptions, must have had such an origin. 

In short, our recognition of language as an institution, as 
an instrumentality, as no integral system of natural and 
necessary representatives of thought, inseparable from 
thought or spontaneously generated by the mind, but, on 
the contrary, a body of conventional signs, deriving their 
value from the mutual understanding of one man with 
another; and, farther, our recognition of the history of this 
institution as being not a mere succession of changes 
wrought upon something which still remains the same in 
essential character, but a real development, effected by 
human forces, whose operations we can trace and understand 
—these take away the whole ground on which the doctrine 
of the divine origin of language, as formerly held, reposed, 
The origin of language is divine, in the same sense in which 
man’s nature, with all its capacities and acquirements, physi- 
cal and moral, is a divine creation; it is human, in that it is 
brought about through that nature, by human instrument. 
ality. 

It is hardly necessary to make any farther reference to an 
ebjection, already once alluded to, which some minds may 


x1.] IN WHAT SENSE DIVINE. AUT 


he tempted to raise against our whole construction of the 
course of linguistic history out of the evidences of compusi- 
tion, phonetic corruption, transfer of meaning, and the other 
processes of linguistic growth, which we find in all the 
material of human speech. ‘The inquiry, namely, has some- 
times been raised, whether it was not perfectly possible for 
the Creator to frame and communicate to mortals a primitive 
language filled with such apparent signs of previous develop- 
ment, as well as one which should have the aspect of a new 
creation. Of course, must be our reply ; nothing is theoret- 
ically impossible to Omnipotence: but to suppose that it has 
pleased God to work thus is to make the most violent and 
inadmissible of assumptions, one which imputes to him a 
wholly degrading readiness to trifle with, even to deliberately 
mislead and deceive, the reason which he has implanted in 
his creatures. It is precisely of a piece with the suggestion 
once currently thrown out, when the revelations of geology 
were first beginning to be brought to light, that fossils and 
stratifications and such like facts proved nothing ; since God, 
when he made the rocks, could just as well have made them 
in this form and with these contents as otherwise. With 
men who can seriously argue upon such assumptions it is 
simply impossible to discuss a historical question: all the 
influences of historical science are thrown away upon them; 
they are capable of believing that a tree which they have 
not themselves seen spring up from the seed was created 
whole in the state in which they find it, without gradual 
growth ; or even that a house, a watch, a picture, were pro- 
duced just as they are, by the immediate action of almighty 
power. 

We may here fittingly follow out a little farther an 
analogy more than once suggested in our preceding discus- 
sions, and one which, though some may deem it homely and 
undignified, is genuine and truly illustrative, and therefore 
not wanting in instruction: it is the analogy between lan- 
guage and clothing and shelter, as alike results of men’s 
needs and men’s capacities. Man was not created, like the 
inferior races, with a frame able to bear all the vicissitudes of 
climate to which he should be subjected; nor yet with a 

26 


402 ANALOGIES BETWEEN LANGUAGE 'TLECT 


natural protective covering of hair or wool, capable of adapt. 
ing itself to the variety of the seasons: every human being 
is born into the world naked and cringing, needing protection 
against exposure and defence from shame. Gifted js man, 
accordingly, with all the ingenuity which he requires in order 
to provide for this need, and placed in the midst of objects 
calculated to answer to his requirements, suitable materials 
for his ingenuity to work upon ready to his hand. And 
hence, it is hardly less distinctively characteristic of man to 
be clad than to speak ; nor is any other animal so universally 
housed as he. Clothing began with the simplest natural 
productions, with leaves and bark, with skins of wild animals, 
and the like; as shelter with a cave, a hole in the ground, 
the hollow of a tree, a nest of interwoven branches. But 
ingenuity and taste, with methods perfected and handed 
down from generation to generation, made themselves, more 
and more, ministers to higher and less simple needs: the 
craving after comfort, ease, variety, grace, beauty, sought 
satisfaction ; and architecture by degrees became an art, and 
dress-making a handicraft, each surrounded by a crowd of 
auxiliary arts and handicrafts, giving occupation to no insig- 
nificant part of the human race, calling into action some of 
its noblest endowments, and bringing forth forms of elegance 
and beauty—embodiments of conceptions, realizations of 
ideals, produced by long ages of cultivation, and capable 
neither of being conceived nor realized until after a pro- 
tracted course of training. So was it also with language. 
Man was not created with a mere gamut of instinctive cries, 
nor yet with a song like the bird’s, as the highest expression 
of his love and enjoyment of life: he had wants, and capaci- 
ties of indefinite improvement, which could be satisfied and 
developed only through means of speech ; nor was he treated 
by nature with a disappointing and baffling niggardliness in 
respect to them; he was furnished also with organs of 
speech, and the power to apply their products to use in the 
formation of language. His first beginnings were rude and 
insufficient, but the consenting labour of generations has 
perfected them, till human thought has been clothed in gar- 
ments measurably worthy of it, and an edifice of speech has 


xr] AND CLOTHING AND SHELTER. 403 


been erected, grander, more beautiful, and more important 
to our racé than any other work whatever of its producing. 
There are races yet living whose scanty needs and inferior 
vapacities have given them inferior forms of speech, as there 
are races which have not striven after, or been able to con- 
trive, any but the rudest raiment, the meanest shelter. But 
the child now born among us is dressed in the products of 
every continent and every clime, and housed, it may be, in 
an edifice whose rules of construction have come down from 
Egypt and Greece, through generations of architects and 
craftsmen; as he is also taught to express himself in words 
and forms far older than the pyramids, and elaborated by a 
countless succession of thinkers and speakers. 

This comparison might profitably be drawn out in yet 
fuller detail, but I forbear to urge it farther, or to call at- 
tention to any other of the aspects in which it may be made 
to cast light upon the development of speech. Enough has 
been said, as I hope, to make plain that the assumption of 
miraculous intervention, of superhuman agency, in the first 
production of speech, is, so far as linguistic science is con- 
cerned, wholly gratuitous, called for by nothing which is 
brought to light by our study of language and of its relations 
to the nature and history of man. 

It is next of primary and fundamental importance that 
we make clear to ourselves what is the force directly and 
immediately impelling to the production of speech. Speech, 
we know, is composed of external audible signs for internal 
acts, for conceptions—for ideas, taking that word in its most 
general sense. But why create such signs? The doctrine, 
now, is by no means uncommon, that thought seeks expres- 
sion by an internal impulse; that it is even driven to ex- 
pression by an inward necessity ; that it cannot be thought 
at all without incorporation in speech; that it tends to ut- 
terance as the fully matured embryo tends te burst its 
envelop, and to come forth into independent life. This doce. 
trine is, in my view, altogether erroneous: I am unable to 
see upon what it is founded, if not upon arbitrary assumption, 
combined with a thorough misapprehension of the relation 


between thought and its expression. It is manifestly op- 
26 * 


404 LANGUAGH THE PRODUCT [LEOT. 


posed to all the conclusions to which we have been thus far 
led by our inquiries into the nature and office of speech. 
Speech is not w personal possession, but a social; it belongs, 
not to the individual, but to the member of society. No 
item of existing language is the work of an individual; for 
what we may severally choose to say is not language until it 
be accepted and employed by our fellows. The whole 
development of speech, though initiated by the acts of indivi- 
duals, is wrought out by the community. That is a word, 
no matter what may be its origin, its length, its phonetic 
form, which is understood in any community, however limited, 
as the sign of an idea; and their mutual understanding is the 
only tie which connects it with that idea. It is a sign which 
each one has acquired from without, from the usage of others; 
and each has learned the art of intimating by such signs the 
internal acts of his mind, Mutual intelligibility, we have 
seen, is the only quality which makes the unity of a spoken 
tongue; the necessity of mutual intelligibility is the only 
force which keeps it one; and the desire of mutual intelligi- 
bility is the impulse which called out speech. Man speaks, 
then, primarily, not in order to think, but in order to impart 
his thought. His so¢ial needs, his social instincts, force him 
to expression. A solitary man would never frame a language. 
Let a child grow up in utter seclusion, and, however rich and 
suggestive might be the nature around him, however full and 
appreciative his sense of that which lay without, and his 
consciousness of that which went on within him, he would 
all his life remain a mute. On the other hand, let two 
children grow up together, wholly untaught to speak, and 
they would inevitably devise, step by step, some means of ex- 
pression for the purpose of communication; how rudiment- 
ary, of what slow growth, we cannot tell—and, however in- 
teresting and instructive it would be to test the matter by 
experiment, humanity forbids us ever to hope or desire to do 
so; doubtless the character of the speech produced would vary 
with difference of capacity, with natural or accidental differ- 
ence of circumstances: but it is inconceivable that human 
beings should abide long in each other’s society without 
efforts, ax.d successful efforts, at intelligent interchange of 


XI. ] OF SOCIAL WANTS AND IMPULSES. 405 


thought. Again, let one who had grown up even to man.- 
hood among his fellows, in full and free communication with 
them, be long separated from them and forced to live in 
solitude, and he would unlearn his native speech by degrees 
through mere disuse, and be found at last unaole to converse 
at all, or otherwise than lamely, until he had recovered by 
new practice his former facility of expression. While a 
Swiss Family Robinson keep up their language, and enrich 
it with names for all the new and strange places and products 
with which their novel circumstances bring them in contact, 
a Robinson Crusoe almost loses his for lack of a companion 
with whom to employ it. We need not, however, rely for 
this conclusion upon imaginary cases alone. It is a well- 
known fact that children who are deprived of hearing even 
at the age of four or five years, after they have learned to 
speak readily and well, and who are thus cut off from vocal 
communication with those about them, usually forget all they 
had learned, and become as mute as if they had never ac- 
quired the power of clothing their thoughts in words. The 
internal impulse to expression is there, but it is impotent 
to develop itself and produce speech: exclusion from the 
ordinary intercourse of man with man not only thwarts its 
progress, but renders it unable to maintain itself upon the 
stage at which it had already arrived. 

Language, then, is the spoken means whereby thought is 
comnunicated, and it is only that. Language is not thought, 
nor is thought language; nor is there a mysterious and in- 
dissoluble connection between the two, as there is between 
soul and body, so that the one cannot exist and manifest 
itself without the other. There can hardly be a greater and 
more pernicious error, in linguistics or in metaphysics, than 
the doctrine that language and thought are identical. It is, 
unfortunately, an error often committed, both by linguists 
and by metaphysicians. ‘ Man speaks because he thinks ” 
is the dictum out of which more than one scholar has pro- 
ceeded to develop his system of linguistic philosophy. The 
assertion, indeed, is not only true, but a truism; no one can 
presume to claim that man would speak if he did not think: 
but no fair logical process can derive any momentous con 


406 LANGUA J AND THOUGHT [LEor 


clusicrs from so loose a premise. So man would not wear 
clothes if he had not a body; he would not build spinning 
mules and jennies if cotton did not grow on bushes, or wool 
on sheep’s backs: yet the body is more than raiment, nor do 
cotton-bushes and sheep necessitate wheels and water-power. 
The body would be neither comfortable nor comely, if not 
clad ; cotton and wool would be of little use, but for ma- 
chinery making quick and cheap their conversion into cloth ; 
and, ina truly analogous way, thought would be awkward, 
feeble, and indistinct, without the dress, the apparatus, 
which is afforded it in language. Our denial of the identity 
of thought with its expression does not compel us to abate 
one jot or tittle of the exceeding value of speech to thought ; 
it only puts that value upon its proper basis. 

That thought and speech are not the same is a direct and 
necessary inference, I believe, from more than one of the 
truths respecting language which our discussions have already 
established ; but the high importance attaching to a right 
understanding of the point will justify us in a brief review 
of those truths in their application to it. In the first place, 
we have often had our attention directed to the imperfection 
of language as a full representation of thought. Words and 
phrases are but the skeleton of expression, hints of meaning, 
light touches of a skilful sketcher’s pencil, to which the ap- 
preciative sense and sympathetic mind must supply the 
filling up and colouring. Our own mental acts and states 
we can review in our consciousness in minute detail, but we 
can never perfectly disclose them to another by speech; nor 
will words alone, with whatever sincerity and candour they 
may be uttered, put us in possession of another’s conscious~ 
ness. In anything but the most objective scientific descrip- 


* 
. 


tion, or the driest reasoning on subjects the most plain and 
obvious, we want more or less knowledge of the individuality 
of the speaker or writer, ere we can understand him inti- 
mately ; his style of thought and sentiment must be gathered 
from the totality of our intercourse with him, to make us 
sure that we penetrate to the central meaning of any word 
he utters; and such study may enable us to find deeper and © 


deeper significance in expressions that once seemed trivial or 


X1.] NOT IDENTICAL. 407 


commonp.ace. A look or tone often sheds more light upon 
character or intent than a flood of words could do. Huinour, 
banter, irony, are illustrations of what tone, or style, or per- 
ceived incongruity can accomplish in the way of impressing 
upon words a different meaning from that which they of 
themselves would wear. That language is impotent to 
express our feelings, though often, perhaps, pleaded as a form 
merely, is also a frequent genuine experience; nor is it for 
our feelings alone that the ordinary conventional phrases, 
weakened in their force by insincere and hyperbolical use, are 
found insufficient: apprehensions, distinctions, opinions, of 
every kind, elude our efforts at description, definition, inti- 
mation. How often must we labour, by painful circumlocu- 
tion, by gradual approach and limitation, to place before the 
minds of others a conception which is clearly present to our 
own consciousness! How often, when we have the expres- 
sion nearly complete, we miss a single word that we need, 
and must search for it, in our memories or our dictionaries, 
perhaps not finding it in either! How different is the 
capacity of ready and distinct expression in men whose power 
of thought is not unlike! he whose grasp of mind is the 
greatest, whose review of the circumstances that should lead 
to a judgment is most comprehensive and thorough, whose 
skill of inference is most unerring, may be, much more than 
another of far weaker gifts, awkward and clumsy of speech. 
How often we understand what one says better than he 
himself says it, and correct his expression, to his own grati- 
fication and acceptance. And if all the resources of ex- 
pression are not equally at the command of all men of equal 
mental force and training, so neither are they, at their best, 
adequate to the wealth of conception of him who wields 
them ; that would be but a poorly stored and infertile mind 
which did not sometimes feel the limited capacity of lan- 
guage, and long for fuller means of expression. 

But again, the variety of expression of which the same 
thought admits is an insuperable difficulty in the way of 
the identification we are opposing. To recur once more to 
an illustration of which we have already made use—I form 
and utter, for instance, the thought, fish like water. How 


“458 RELATION OF [LECT 


nearly bare this phrase is of all indication of relations 
between the principal ideas, bow ambiguous it is, but for the 
tone, the zonnection, the cireumstances in which it is used, 
was pointed out before. If I say “fish, like water-rats, 
swim in rivers,” or “ fish-like water-snakes abound here,” I 
have variously changed the elements of thought which these 
words indicate, without any corresponding change of their 
form. Were I, now, an ancient Roman, the words in which 
I should have put my first thought would be pisces amant 
aquam. Here, not only are the signs totally different, but a 
host of things are distinctly expressed which before were left 
to be inferrea from the sum and surroundings of the state- 
ment, Pisces is marked not only as being a noun and 
nothing else, but a noun in a certain case of the plural 
number ; amant is not less clearly a verb, and to be made 
nowhere but in the third person plural of the present indica- 
tive active ; while aguam shows by its form that it is used as 
the direct object of the preceding verb, and that in all con- 
nections it is to be treated as a feminine word. If, again, I 
were a Frenchman, I should have said, les poissons aiment 
Peau, literally, ‘the fishes love the water.’ Here nearly all 
the expressions of relation which the Latin words conveyed 
are lost again; in part, they are left to inference, as 
in English; im part, they are intimated by the two 
independent relational words, articles; which, moreover, 
point out a new relation, that of class (fish in general, not 
some fish only), not hinted at in either of the other phrases. 
The Chinese would embody the same sense in still other 
words, which would be even more barren than our English of 
any indication of relations except such as is signified by the 
respective position of the words and the requirements of the 
situation, Other languages, in expressing the same idea, 
would indicate yet other distinctions and relations: one, 
perhaps, has a different word for fish when living from that 
which denotes them when dead, or prepared for eating; 
another signifies the fondness which fish have for their native 
-element by one term, and the higher affections of more 
rational beings by another; and so on. There is thus a very 
considerable discordance between the various equivalent 


x1.] LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT, 409 


phrases, as to how much and what is expressed in the words 
signifying the three radical ideas, of fish, liking, and water, 
as to how much is expressed besides those ideas, and as to 
how it is expressed; and, at the same time, a total discord- 
ance between the sounds used to indicate the various 
elements, And yet, so far as we can judge, the thought 
expressed is in every instance the very same: certainly, 
there is no difference of thought corresponding to or 
measured by the difference of expression. Each speaker’s 
intent, were he called upon to explain it fully, would be 
found to agree with that of the rest; only his uttered 
words directly signify a part, and leave the rest to be filled 
in by the mind of the hearer. How, now, can any one 
possibly maintain that thought and speech are one and the 
same, when identity of thought can consist with so much 
diversity of speech ? 

Look, once more, at the nature of the tie which, as repeat- 
edly pointed out, connects any one of the spoken signs we 
use with the conception it represents. I learned the word 
fish at an early period of my life from my instructors, and 
associated it so intimately with a certain idea that the two 
are in nly mind well-nigh inseparable: I cannot hear fish 
without having the corresponding thing called up in my 
imagination, nor utter it without calling up the same in the 
imagination of every person who has been taught as I was; 
nor, again, does any one of us ordinarily form the conception 
of a fish without at the same time having the audible complex 
uf sounds, fish, uttered to the mind’s ear. In later life, I 
have learned and associated with the same conception other 
words, as piseis, poisson, ichthiis (Greek), and so forth; any 
one of these I can call up at will, and employ in place of 
Jish, when circumstances make it desirable. That I here use 
Jish is simply for the reason that I am addressing myself to 
those who have mastered this sign, understand it readily, and 
are accustomed to employ it; the conventional usage of the 
community to which I belong, not anything in the character 
of my thought, imposes the necessity upon me: if I went to 
France, I should substitute the sign povsson for precisely the 
same reason. And I might stay so long in France, and say 


410 RELATION OF [LECT 


and hear poisson so often, that it should become more inti- 
mately associated with its conception than fish, and should 
come more readily and naturally than the latter into my 
mind on presentation of the conception: I should then have 
learned, as we phrase it, to think in French instead of 
English. How futile, I say again, to talk of such a thing as 
identity between thought and the expression which sits so 
loosely upon it, and can be so easily shifted! As well com- 
pare the house of the hermit-crab—which, born soft and 
coverless, takes refuge in the first suitable shell which chance 
throws in its way, and thenceforth maxes that its home, 
unless convenience and opportunity lead it to move to 
another—with that of the turtle, whose horny covering is a 
part of its own structure, and cannot be torn off without 
destruction of its life. 

Is there not, in fact, something approaching to palpable 
absurdity in the doctrine that words and thonghts are 
identical, that the mind thinks words? Words are not 
mental acts; they are combinations of sounds, effects pro- 
duced upon the auditory nerve by atmospheric vibrations, 
which are brought about by physical agencies—agencies set in 
operation, it is true, by acts of volition, but whose products are 
no more mental than are pantomimic motions voluntarily 
made with the fingers. We know well, indeed, that there is 
a language composed of such motions instead of uttered 
words: namely, the language taught as means of communica- 
tion and expression to those whose ear is numb to the 
ordinary signs of thought. Nothing brings more distinctly 
to light the true nature of language, as a system of arbitrary 
signs for thought, learned and made auxiliary to the processes 
of thought, than a consideration of the modes of speech 
practised by the deaf and dumb: whether their general lan- 
guage, which intimates ideas by significant gestures, possess- 
ing in the main a certain degree of evident relevancy, but 
conventional in their special application; or their finger- 
speech, that most strange and anomalous mode of represent- 
ation of ideas at second hand, by wholly arbitrary contortions 
of certain appendages of the body, standing for another kind «' 
of sigus, namely articulate sounds, of the true nature of 


x1.] LANGUjG# AND fHOUG! . 411 


which these unfortunate beings cannot form the slightest 
conception. But either of these kinds of language, or their 
combination, answers for the deaf-mute the same purpose 
that our speech answers for us, and in the same way, only in 
an inferior degree, owing to the comparative imperfection of 
the instrumentality—although the question may be seriously 
raised, whether it be not nearly or quite as effective a means 
of expression and aid of thought as is a rude and rudimentary 
spoken language like the Chinese. If, then, thought and 
language are identical, thought and pantomime are not less 
so; if we think words, the mute must think finger-twists ; 
and who will venture seriously to maintain a proposition so 
manifestly preposterous ? 

But if we must thus deny that, in any admissible sense of 
the expression, language zs thought, it still remains for us to 
inquire whether thought is not co-extensive with and depend- 
ent upon language; whether we can think otherwise than in 
and by words. The claim is sometimes roundly made, that 
“general ideas and words are inseparable; that the one can- 
not exist without the other ;” that, “ without words, not even 
such simple ideas as white or black can for a moment be 
realized.” Let us examine for a moment this last assertion, 
and see whether it be well founded. Suppose, for instance, 
that there occurred but a single white substance, namely 
snow, in the nature by which we are surrounded: it is both 
possible and altogether likely that, while we had a name for 
the substance, we should have none for the colour: and yet, 
we should not therefore any the less apprehend that colour, 
as distinct from those of other objects; even as we now 
apprehend a host of shades of blue, green, red, purple, for 
which we possess no specific appellations. We conceive of 
them, we are able to recognize them at sight, but their 
practical value is not sufficient to lead us to name them 
separately. If, then, on going southward, we made acquaint- 
ance with cotton, we should not fail to notice and fully to 
realize its accordance with snow in the quality of whiteness, 
even though we had no name for the quality. On the con- 
trary, we should certainly proceed to call cotton “snowy,” 
for the precise reason that we did notice the correspondence 


412 POWER OF THOUGHT [ LEOT. 


of the two in colour; and, as we went on to meet with other 
substances of like hue, we should call them “ snowy ” also ; 
and at length—particularly, if we had left the zone of snow 
behind us—szowy would come to mean in our use what 
white does now, and snowiness would signify ‘ whiteness.’ 
We should have supplied the deficiency of our vocabulary in 
this regard, not because we could not form a conception of 
the colour without the name, but because we had found it 
practically convenient to give a name to the conception we 
had formed. The example is a typical one; it ilustrates 
the universal process of names-giving, in all its forms and in 
all ages. Our primitive ancestors were not unable to appre- 
hend the existence and office of the earth’s satellite until 
they had devised for her the appellation of ‘measurer ;’ and, 
if she had a yet earlier title, it was given her in like manner, 
for some quality distinctly perceived in her. We always 
make a new word, or bestow upon an old word a new mean- 
ing, because we have an idea that wants a sign. To main- 
tain that the idea waits for its generation until the sign is 
ready, or that the generation of the idea and of the sign is & 
simple and indivisible process, is much the same thing as to 
hoid, since infants cannot thrive in this climate without 
clothing and shelter, that no child is or can be born until a 
layette and a nursery are ready for its use, or that along with 
each child are born its swaddling-clothes and a cradle! 

It must be farther conceded, then, that the operations of 
mind are at least so far independent of language that thought 
is able to reach out in every direction a step beyond the bor- 
der of speech; to conquer, bit by bit, new territory for 
speech to occupy and hold in possession, But our earlier 
reasonings and examples have shown that there is no small 
degree of incommensurability between the two in other re- 
spects also, that we do not and cannot always precisely com- 
municate what we are conscious of having in our minds, and 
that, of what we call our expression, a part consists merely 
in so disposing a framework of words that those who hear us 
are enabled to infer much more than we really express, ana 
much more definitely than we express it. That we ordinarily 
think with words may be true: but 1 imagine that the ex- 


xI.] INDEPENDENT OF LANGUAGE. 413 


tent to which we do so, and the necessity of the accompani- 
ment, are both apt to be considerably exaggerated. When 
we think most elaborately and most reflectively, then we 
formulate our thoughts as if we were speaking or writing 
them; but we need not always think in that style. If I 
hold up two sticks together, to see which is the longer, my 
comparison and conclusion are assuredly, both of them, inde- 
pendent of any use of language, spoken or conceived of. 
When I taste a bit of strong sea-duck, which has been put 
upon my plate for mallard, my perception of its flavour and 
my judgment that “the bird is fishy ” are wholly instan- 
taneous, and simple mental acts: I may then proceed to 
state my judgment, either to myself or to others, in whatever 
style of elaboration I may choose. This, if I mistake not, 
is the normal order of procedure: the mental act is moment- 
ary, its formulation in words occupies time; we have our 
thought to start with, and then go on to give it deliberate 
expression. The operation of thinking in words is a double 
one ; it consists of thinking and of putting the thonght into 
words ; we conceive the thought and conceive also its ex- 
pression. That, when we turn our attention full upon our 
own minds, we read there the act and its expression together, 
does not necessarily prove more than the intimacy of the 
association we have established between our conceptions and 
their signs, and the power over us of the habit of expression. 
Every deliberate thought, doubtless, goes through the mind 
of the deaf-mute accompanied by an image of the dactylic 
writhings which would be his natural mode of expressing it ; * 
but his mental action is not slavishly dependent upon such 
an external auxiliary. 

The only way, in fact, to prove the necessary connection 
and mutual limitation of thought and speech is to lay down 
such a definition of the former as excludes everything which 


* Indeed, I know that the children of a late principal of the Hartferd 
deaf-and-dumb asylum, who had grown up in the asylum, and knew the pe- 
culiar language of the inmates as familiarly as their English, could always 
tell what their father was thinking of, as he walked up and down in medita- 
tion, by watching his hands: his fingers involuntarily formed the signs 
which were associated in his mind with his subjects of thought; while at the 
same time, doubtless, he imagined also their spoken signs 


214 MENTAL ACTION [LECT 


is not done by means of the latter. If thought is only that 
kind of mental action which is performed in and through 
words, all other being mere—what shall we eall it >—pre- 
liminary and preparatory to thought, the question becomes 
simply a verbal one, and is settled. But it were futile to 
aitempt thus to narrow the application of the term. Appre- 
hension of generals and particulars, comparison, distinction, 
inference, performed under the review of consciousness, 
capable of being remembered and applied to direct the con- 
duct of life—these are the characteristics of the action of 
mind, in. every grade; where they are present, there is thought. 
And who will dare to deny even to the uninstructed deaf- 
mute the possession of ideas, of cognitions multitudinous and 
various, of power to combine observations and draw con- 
clusions from them, of reasonings, of imaginings, of hopes? 
Who will say, then, that he does not think, though his 
thinking faculty has not yet been trained and developed by 
the aid of a system of signs? But neither can we refuse to 
believe that some of the lower animals have a capacity of 
thinking, although they are incapable of the production of 
any signs of their ideas which we may venture to dignify by 
the name of language. A dog, for instance, as surely ap- 
prehends the general ideas of a tree, a man, a piece of meat, 
cold and heat, light and darkness, pleasure and pain, kind- 
ness, threatening, barking, running, and so on, through the 
whole range, limited as compared with ours, of matters within 
his ken, as if he had a word for each. He can as clearly 
form the intention “I mean to steal that bone, if its owner 
turns his back and gives me a fair chance,” as if he said it 
to himself in good English. He can draw a complex of syl- 
logisms, when applying to present exigencies the results of 
past experience, and can determine “ that smoking water 
must be hot, and I shall take good care not to put my foot 
into it’’—that is to say, “water that smokes is hot; this 
water smokes ; therefore, this water is hot : hot water hurts ; 
this water is hot; ergo, it will hurt my foot.” He is, to be 
sure, far enough from being able to put his process of 
thought into that shape; but so is many a human being who 
can not only draw the conclusion with unerring judgment, 


x1.] OF BRUTES AND MUTES. 415 


but also state it with perfect intelligibility. That the dog 
and many other animals make no very distant approach to 
a capacity for language is shown farther by their ability to 
understand and obey what is said to them. They are able so 
distinctly to associate certain ideas with the words we utter 
as to govern their actions accordingly. Even the dull ox 
knows which way to turn when his driver cries gee or haw to 
him; and the exceeding intelligence with which some dogs 
will Jisten to directions, and even overhear conversation, has 
been the subject of many striking and authentic anecdotes. 
It is vain and needless to deny a correspondence up to a 
certain point between men and other animals in regard to 
the phenomena of mental activity, as well as the other phe- 
nomena connected with animal Jife, like digestion, motion, en- 
joyment and suffering. But their power of thinking is not, 
like ours, capable of free and indefinite development by edu- 
cation, whereof language is the chief means, as it is the sign 
also of a capacity for it. There is, it need not be doubted, 
no small difference between the thought of the most intelli- 
gent of the lower races, and that of the least cultivated 
speechless human being. Yet what a chaos of unanalyzed 
conceptions, undefined impressious, and unreasoned con- 
clusions the mind of every one of us would be without 
speech, it is well-nigh impossible for us to have even a faint 
idea—for us who have so long enjoyed the advantage of ex- 
pression, and so accustomed ourselves to lean upon it, that 
we can now even differ and dispute as to whether thought 
and its instrument are not one and the same thing. The 
mental action of the wholly wild and untrained man is cer- 
tainly less unlike to that of the beast than to that of the man 
who has been educated by the acquisition and use of lan- 
guage. The distinction of the two former is mainly that of 
potentiality ; they are like the fecundated and the unfecun- 
dated egg: the one can develop into organized life; the 
other cannot. Let us look at an illustration which shall set 
forth both their correspondence and their difference. 

It has been often remarked that the crow has a capacity to 
count, up to a certain number. If two hunters enter a hut 
and only one comes out, he will not be allured near the place 


4at§ DIFFERENCE OF MENTAL ACTION [ LECT. 


by any bait, however tempting; the same will be the case, if 
three enter and two come out, or if four enter and three 
ecme out—and so on, till a number is reached which is be- 
yond his arithmetic; till he cannot perceive that one has 
heen left behind, and so is led to venture within reach of the 
hidden gun, to his destruction. Something very like this would 
be true of men, without language. Open for the briefest 
iastant a hand with one corn init, and then again with two, 
and any one who has an eye can tell the difference; so with 
two and three, with three and four—and so on, up to a limit 
which may vary with the quickness of eye and readiness of 
thought of the counter, results of his natural capacity or of 
his training, but which is surely reached, and soon. Open 
the hand, for instance, with twenty corns, then drop one 
secretly and open it again, and the surest eye that ever 
looked could not detect the loss. Or put near one another 
two piles or rows, one of nineteen, the other of twenty, and 
it would be not less impracticable to distinguish them by im- 
mediate apprehension. But here appears the discordance 
between the human mind and that of the brute. The crow 
would never find out that the heap of twenty is greater than 
that of nineteen; the man does it without difficulty: he 
analyzes or breaks up both into parts, say of four corns each, 
the numerical value of which he can immediately apprehend, 
as well as their number; and he at last finds a couple of 
parts, whereof both he and the crow could see that the one 
exceeds the other. 

In this power of detailed review, analysis, and comparison, 
now, lies, as I conceive, the first fundamental trait of superi- 
ority of man’s endowment. But this is not all. This would 
merely amount to a great and valuable extension of the 
limits of immediate apprehension ; whereas the crow knows 
well that three corns are more than two corns, man would 
be able also to satisfy himself, in every actual case which should 
arise, that twenty corns are more than nineteen corns, or a 
hundred corns than ninety-nine corns; and he would be 
able to make an intelligent choice of the larger heap where 
a crow might. cheat himself through ignorance. So much ig 
pessible without language, nor would it alone ever lead to 


xI.] IN MEN AND OTHER ANIMALS. 417 


the possession of language. In order to this, anothur kind 
of analysis is necessary, an analysis which separates the 
qualities of a thing from the thing itself, and contemplates 
them apart. The man, in short, is able to perceive, not only 
that three corns are more than two corns, but that three are 
more than two—a thing that the bird neither does nor can 
do. Such a perception makes language possible—for lan- 
guage-making is a naming of the properties of things, and of 
things themselves through those properties—and, combined 
with the other power which we have just noticed, it creates 
the possibility also of an indefinite progression in thinking 
and reasoning by means of language. Signs being found for 
the conceptions ‘ one,’ ‘two,’ ‘three,’ and so on, we can pro- 
ceed to build them up into any higher aggregate that we 
choose, following each step of combination by a sign, and 
with that sign associating the result of the process that 
made it, so as to be effectually relieved of the necessity of 
performing the process over again in each new case, Thus, 
from the recognition that three is more than two, that two 
and one are three, that twice two is four—all which truths 
are virtually within reach of the crow, since he would deter- 
mine aright any practical question that involved them—we 
rise to the recognition that twenty is more than nineteen, 
that fifteen and five are twenty, that seven times seven are 
forty-nine, or ten times ten are a hundred: and these are 
truths which we could only reach by means of language; 
they are inferences, circuitously arrived at, and made by 
means of language not less manageable than the simpler 
truths which are matters of direct synthetic apprehension. 
He who, having learned only to count, constructs for his own 
use a multiplication-table, has to work onward from step to 
step in somewhat the same way as he who has no speech; 
but every product that he attains and fixes in memory with 
its factors, is an acquisition made once for all. Indefinite 
progress is thus ushered in; every new result of mathemati- 
cal reasoning is rendered capable of being handled, and the 
whole career of mathematical science is initiated. Yet not 
to be carried on by words alone. The most skilful mathema- 
tician cannot perform any of the more complicated processes 
27 


418 AID GIVEN BY [ LECT. 


of calculation with signs merely uttered or conceived of as 
uttered; he must write down his equations and series, and 
work out painfully, in long rows of figures, his numerical re- 
sults: for, though all was implied in his first assumption, as 
evolved according to the unvarying relations of numbers, 
and the principles of mathematical reasoning, he is unable to 
grasp the various quantities with his mind, and to follow out 
unerringly the successive steps of the processes, without re- 
cording each as he takes it. It is none the less true, how- 
ever, that the whole work is a mental one: mathematical 
quantities are identical neither with the written figures and 
symbols, nor with the spoken signs; nor is mathematical 
reasoning dependent for its existence upon the one or the 
other: both are kindred instrumentalities, whereby the mind 
is enabled to accomplish what would otherwise be wholly 
beyond its power. 

The main truths which we have to accept as touching the 
relation of language to thought are, I think, brought out by 
this illustration. It is, indeed, an extreme illustration on 
the side of the indispensability of language. For no other 
class of conceptions are so eminently abstract as are the 
mathematical, none so wholly dependent upon spoken and 
written signs and symbols. They are so essentially ideal in 
their character, so divoreible from concrete objects, that they 
can be worked with mechanically, can be put together and 
taken apart without constant reference to real couditions— 
though only according to rules and methods ultimately 
founded on concrete exemplification, on immediate synthetie 
apprehensions which are capable of being grasped by minds 
lower than human. Yet, even here, the signs are merely 
the instruments of thought, and created by it. The symbols 
of the calculus are not more truly the device of the master- 
minds which, exalted upon the vantage-ground of their own 
aud others’ previous studies, apprehended the higher and 
more recondite relations involved in this new mode of 
mathematical reasoning, than the whole nomenclature of 
numbers is the gradually elaborated work of men who saw 
and felt impelled to signify the simpler and more fundamental 
relations, those which seem to lie within the reach of every 


x1.] LANGUAJE TO THOUGHT. 419 


intellect. That, however, they are not so easily attained, 
that not a little time and refiection, and some special insight, 
were required for generating even an ordinary system of 
numeration, is clearly shown by the facts of language. There 
are dialects that name no higher numbers than ‘three’ or 
‘four:’ all beyond is an undistinguished “ many,” the definite 
relations of which are as unmanageable by the speakers cf 
those dialects as if they were speechless. Many others have 
not risen to the apprehension of a hundred; the Indo- 
European race, before its dispersion, had apparently formed 
no word for ‘thousand ;’ the Greek popular mind had dis- 
tinctly conceived no higher group than ‘ten thousand’ 
(myriad). We have ourselves given names only to a few of 
the first numbers in that infinite series which, having once 
hit upon the method of decimal multiplication and notation, 
we are capable of apprehending and of managing. And 
what more significant mark of the externality of the whole 
system of numerical names and signs could we ask to find 
than its decima! character, pinch. as every one knows, is 
altogether based upon the wholly irrelevant circumstance of 
the number of our fingers, those ready aids to an unready 
reckoner? Had we chanced to possess six digits on each 
hand, our series of arithmetical “digits” would also be 
twelve, and we should now be rejoicing in the use of a 
duodecimal system—the superior advantages of which in 
many respects are generally acknowledged. 

In every department of thought, the mind derives from 
the possession of speech something of the same advantage, 
and in the same way, as in mathematical reasoning. The 
idea which has found its incarnation in a word becomes 
thereby a subject of clearer apprehension and more manage- 
able use: it can be turned over, compared, limited, placed i in 
distinct connection with other ideas; more than one mind, 
more than one generation of minds, can work at it, giving it 
ehape, and relation, and significance. In every word is 
recorded the result of a mental process, of abstraction or of 
combination; which process, being thus recorded, can be 
taught along with its sign, or its result can be used as a step 
to something higher or deeper. There are grades of thoight, 

27 # 


420 AID GIVEN BY [ LECT. 


spheres of ratiocination, where our minds vould hardly work 
at all without the direct aid of language; as there are also 
those where they could not surely hold and follow the chain 
of reason and deduction without the still further assistance 
afforded by writing down the argument. It may be freely 
conceded that such mental processes as we are in the constant 
habit of performing would be too difficult for us to compass 
without words—as they certainly also lie far beyond what 
would have been our mental reach had we not been trained 
through the use of language to orderly thought, and enriched 
with the wealth of mental acquisitions accumulated by our 
predecessors and stored up in words. But this is a very 
different thing from acknowledging that thought is impossible 
without language. So, also, to build steam-engines and 
tubular-bridges, to weave satins and Brussels carpets, to 
tunnel mountains, to fill up valleys, is impossible without the 
aid of complicated and powerful machinery ; yet we do not 
on that account deny all power and efficiency to the bare 
human hands. On the contrary, we see clearly that machin- 
ery is, in every part and parcel, ultimately the work of 
human hands, which can do wondrous things without it, if 
still more wondrous with it. Language, in like manner, is 
the instrument of thought, the machinery with which the 
mind works; an instrument by which its capacity to achieve 
valuable results is indefinitely increased, but which, far from 
being identical with’ it, is one of its own products; with and 
by which it works with freedom, depending upon it now 
more, now less, according to circumstances—as the matter in 
hand, the style of elaboration, the deliberation required or 
permitted ; and fully able to carry on the same operations 
with instrumentalities greatly differing in completeness and 
inherent adaptation to their purpose. 

Our conclusion stands fast, then, that thought is anterior 
to language, and independent of it; it is not compelled to 
find expression in order to be thought. The immense and 
incalculable advantage which it gains from its command of 
speech is something incidental : something intended, indeed, 
and a necessary implication in the gift of speech to the 
human race; yet coming as a consequence of something else, 


x1] LANGUAGE TO THOUGHT. 421 


growing out of that communication which men must and will 
have with their fellows. True it is that the individual mind, 
without language, would be a dwarfed and comparatively 
powerless organ: but this means simply that man could 
develop his powers, and become what he was meant to be, 
only in society, by converse with his fellows. He is by his 
essential nature a social being, and his most precious indi- 
vidual possession, his speech, he gets only as a social being 
The historical beginnings of speech, therefore, were no spo? 
taneous outbursts, realizing to the mind of the utterer the 
conceptions with which he was swelling ; they were success- 
ful results of the endeavour to arrive at signs by which 
those conceptions should be called up also in the minds of 
others. 

These considerations, if I am not mistaken, will be found 
to relieve the remaining part of the problem we are con- 
sidering of not a little of its perplexity. Recognizing the 

external and non-essential nature of the bond which uuites 
every constituent of language to the idea represented by it, 
and also the external nature of the force which brings about 
the genesis of the sign, we are enabled to reduce the inquiry 
to this form: how should the first language-makers, human 
beings gifted like ourselves, with no exceptional endowments, 
but with no disabilities other than that of the non-develop- 
ment of their inherent capacities, have naturally succeeded 
in arriving at the possession of signs by which they could 
understand one another? Before we take up and examine 
the theories which have been proposed to explain the first 
processes of sign-making, however, we must look for a 
moment at one or two preliminary points, of a more general 
character. 

Our first point concerns the office of the voice as instru- 
ment of expression. If the tie between idea and sign be so 
loose, it may be asked, why is the sign always a spoken one, 
and language, as we use the term, a body solely of articulated 
utterances? In answering this, it is sufficient to point out 
the superior convenience and availability of spoken signs, as 
compared with those of any other kind. These qualities, 
and these alone, designate the voice to its office. There is 


422 THE VOICE AS [LEor. 


no necessart connection between mental acts and vocal 
utterances. The one thing necessary is, that thought, tend- 
ing irresistibly toward expression under the impulse to com. 
munication, should find the means of intelligibly expressing 
itself. With the mental powers and social tendencies which 
men have, they would, even if unendowed with voice, have 
nevertheless put themselves in possession of language—lan- 
guage less perfect and manageable, to be sure, than is our 
present speech ; but still, real language. Resort, doubtless, 
would first have been had to gesture: it is hardly less 
natural to men to use their hands than their tongues to help 
the communication of their ideas; the postures of the body, 
the movements of the face, can be made full of significance ; 
the resources of pantomime are various and abundant, and 
cunstitute a means of expression often successfully employed, 
between those who are unacquainted with the conventional 
signs of one another’s spoken language. Those human 
beings whose vocal powers are rendered useless by the dead- 
ness of their ears learn a pantomimic language which answers 
their needs, both of communication and of mental training, 
in uo stinted measure. It has, indeed, its limitations and 
defects; but what it might be made, if it were the only 
means of communication attainable by men, and were 
elaborated by the consenting labour of generations, as spoken 
speech has been, we perhaps are slow to realize. I do not 
doubt that it might far exceed, both in wealth of resources 
and in distinct apprehensibility, many an existing spoken 
language, might ally itself with a mode of writing, and 
become an efficient means and aid of human progress. How 
easy a language of gestures is to acquire, and how natural to 
use, is clearly shown by the fact that the fully endowed 
children of the instructors in deaf-and-dumb asylums, 
brought up among those who employ both it and the spoken 
tongue, are accustomed to learn the former first, and to avail 
themselves of itin preference to the other, till long after the 
time when other children usually talk freely. It is past all 
reasonable question that, in the earliest communication 
between human beings, gesture long played a considerable, 
if not the principal, part, and that our race learned only by 


> ote INSTRUMENT OF EXPRESSION. 423 


degrees the superior capacities of spoken signs, and by 
degrees worked them out to a sufficiency for all the ordinary 
needs of expression; when gesture was relegated to the depart. 
ment of rhetoric, to the office of giving individual colouring 
and intensity to intellectual expression—as, in all well- 
developed languages, has been the case with tone also. We 
do not need to enter here into any detailed inquiry as to the 
modes and reasons of the special adaptedness of vocal utter- 
ance to the uses of expression. The fact is palpable, recog- 
nized by every mind, and illustrated by the whole history of 
human communication. We feel that those who learn to 
talk well without speaking are to be compared with the 
mutilated beings who, deprived of hands, learn to make their 
feet do the ordinary and natural work of hands. Many of 
us have seen toys constructed, figures cut out, pictures 
painted by such beings, with the help of instruments grasped 
by the toes, which we who possess the most supple of fingers 
might try in vain to imitate: and in the possibility of such 
things we note the controlling power of the true actor, the 
human mind and soul, which, in the direction of its special 
gifts, can work out beautiful and wonderful results with 
instrumentalities that appear to us awkward, feeble, and 
inefficient. The voice, the articulating power, was the 
appointed and provided means of supplying the chief want 
of man’s social nature, language; and no race of men fails 
to show, by its possession of articulate speech, that the pro- 
vision was one natural, recognizable, and sufficient. 

Our second point concerns the general class of ideas 
which should have first found incorporation in speech, 
What we are brought by our historical analysis of language 
to recognize as the beginnings of speech was set forth in the 
seventh lecture. Roots, directly significant of quality or 
action, were there shown to be the starting-points, the germs, 
of our whole vast system of nomenclature, for qualities, * 
beings, and relations, Many minds, however, find a difficulty 
in accepting such a result. They are unwilling to believe 
that language can have begun with the expression of any- 
thing so abstract as a quality ; they feel as if the first words 
must have been designations for concrete things, for the 


424 ACTS AND QUALITIES “LEW 


familiar objects of primitive life. The source of their diffie 
culty Hes in the fact that they would confound the prima 
denominata, the things first named, with the prima cognita, 
the things first cognized, apprehended by the mind, either 
as individuals or as classes. In truth, however, the two are 
quite distinct. It isnot to be doubted that concrete things 
are first recognized, distinguished, and classified, in the 
earliest synthetic operations of the intelligence ; so are they 
also in the inferior intelligences of the lower animals; but 
these synthetic cognitions do not and cannot lead to lan- 
guage. Language begins with analysis, and the apprehen- 
sion of characteristic qualities. Not what the mind first 
consciously contemplated, but what was most readily capa- 
ble of being intelligibly signified, determined the earliest 
words. Now a concrete object, a complex existence, is just 
as much out of the immediate reach of the sign-making 
faculty as is a moral act or an intellectual relation. As, 
during the whole history of language, designations of the 
latter classes of ideas have been arrived at through the me- 
dium of names for physical acts and relations, so have appel- 
lations for the former been won by means of their perceived 
characteristics. No etymologist feels that he has traced out 
the history of any concrete appellation till he has carried it 
back to a word expressive of quality. We saw in the third 
lecture that, when we would make a name for a thing, we 
have recourse always to its qualities ; we take some general 
word designating one of its distinguishing properties, and 
limit it to signifying the thing itself (as when we derived 
board from broad, moon from measuring, smith from smooth- 
ing); or else we identify by some common property or pro- 
perties, or connect by some other equivalent tie of association, 
the thing to be named with another thing already named, 
and call it by the latter’s title (as in deriving Jupiter’s moons 
from moon, Board of Trade from board, Smiths from smith). 
Let any one of us, even now, after all our long training in 
the expression of our conceptions, attempt to convey to an- 
other person his idea of some sensible thing, and he will 
inevitably find himself reviewing its distinctive qualities, and 


x1. | THE FIRST THINGS NAMED. 4235 


selecting those which he shall intimate, by such signs as he 
can make intelligible: there is no other way in which we 
can make a definition or description, whether for our own 
use or for that of anybody else. If, for example, a dog is 
the subject of our effort, we compare our conception of him 
with those of other sensible objects, and note its specific dif- 
ferences—as his animality, shape, size, disposition, voice. 
This is so essentially a human procedure that we cannot con- 
ceive of the first makers of language as following any other. 
Then, in finding a designation, it would be impossible to in- 
clude and body forth together the sum of observed qualities : 
in the first instance, not less than in all after time, some one 
among them would necessarily be made the ground of appel- 
lation. The sign produced would naturally vary with the 
instrumentality used to produce it, and the sense to which it 
was addressed: in the instance which we have supposed, if 
the means of communication were writing, it would probably 
be the outline figure of a dog; if gesture, an imitation of 
some characteristic visible act, like biting, or wagging the 
tail; if the voice, not less evidently an imitation of the 
audible act of barking: the dog’s primal designation would 
be bow-wow, or something equivalent to it. But in this 
designation would be directly intimated the act; the actor 
would be suggested by implication merely : bow-wow, as name 
for ‘dog,’ would literally mean ‘the animal that bow-wows.’ 
So in the case of a word like splash, used to imitate and call 
up before the mind the fall of a stone into water—the col- 
lision of the stone and the water would be the immediate 
suggestion ; but a natural act of association might make the 
sigu mean the stone, or the water, or the act of throwing, or 
the fall. One sign would turn more readily to the desig- 
nation of a property or action, another to that of a concrete 
thing, an actor, according to the nature of each, and the 
exigencies of practical use as regarded it; but both would 
be inherently a kind of indifferent middle, capable of con- 
version to either purpose: and, in the poverty of expression 
and indistinctness of analysis belonging to the primitive stage 
of linguistic growth, would doubtless bear various offices at 


426 THEORIES OF THE [ LECT. 


once. In short, they would be such rudiments of speech, 
rather than parts of speech, as we have already found the 
radical elements of language to be. 

Thus we see that the necessary conditions of the act of pro- 
duction of our language, as being the creation of a spoken 
sign for mutual intelligence between speaker and hearer, de- 
termme the kind of significance belonging to the first pro- 
duced words. An acted sign, anda language of such, wouid 
have been of the same quality. While, on the other hand, 
a language of written characters, beginning with pictorial 
signs, would be of a very different structure : its first words 
would be designations of concrete sensible objects—since 
drawings are fitted to suggest concrete objects rather than 
their individual qualities—and, from these, designations of > 
qualities woul’ have to be arrived at by secondary processes. 

Our reasonings have now at length brought us very near 
to a positive conclusion respecting the mode of genesis of 
even the first beginnings of spoken speech. But, rather 
than follow them farther, to a yet more definite result, we 
will proceed to examine the various theories that have been 
framed to explain how men should have found out what their 
voice was given them for, and should have begun to apply it 
to its proper uses, producing with it significant words, 

Of such theories there are three which are especially 
worthy of note. The first holds that the earliest names of 
objects and actions, were produced by imitation of natural 
sounds : animals, for instance, were denominated from their 
characteristic utterances, as, with us, the cuckoo is so named: 
the dog was called a bow-wow, the sheep a baa, the cow a 
moo, and so on; while the many noises of inanimate nature, 
as the whistling of the wind, the rustling of leaves, the gurg= 
ling and splashing of water, the cracking and crashing of 
heavy falling objects, suggested in like manner imitative 
utterances which were applied to designate them; and that 
by such means a sufficient store of radical words was origin- 
ated to serve as the germs of language. This is called the 
onomatopoetic theory. The second is to this effect: that the 
natural sounds which we utter when in a state of excited 
fecling, the oh’s and ah’s, the pook’s and pshaw’s, are the uli. 


X1.] . ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 427 


mate beyinnings of speech. This is styled the interjectional 
theory. A recent writer of great popularity, Professor Max 
Miiller,* enttrely rejects both these, stigmatizing them as 
“the bow-wow theory” and “ the pooh-pooh theory” respect- 
ively, and adopts from a German authority (Professor Heyse, 
of Berlin) a third, which is, abridged from his own statement, 
ws follows: “ There is a law which runs through nearly the 
whole of nature, that everything which is struck rings. 
Each substance has its peculiar ring.... It was the same 
with man, the most hizhly organized of nature’s works ”— 
and so on. Man possessed an instinctive “faculty for giv- 
ing articulate expression to the rational conceptions of his 
mind.” But “this creative faculty, which gave to each con- 
ception, as it thrilled for the first time through the brain, a 
phonetic expression, became extinct when its object_was ful- 
filled,’ etc. This, in its turn, has been very appositely 
termed “ the ding-dong theory.” 

What value we have to attribute to these various theories 
is readily to be inferred from the principles already laid down 
and established. The third may be very summarily dis- 
missed, as wholly unfounded and worthless. It is, indeed, 
not a little surprismg to see a man of the acknowledged 
ability and great learning of Professor Miiller, after depre- 
ciating and casting ridicule upon the views of others respect- 
ing so important a point, put forward one of his own as a 
mere authoritative dictum, resting it upon nothing better 
than a fanciful comparison which lacks every element of a 
true analogy, not venturing to attempt its support by a 
single argument, instance, or illustration, drawn from either 
the nature or the history of language. He tells us, virtually, 
that man was at the outset a kind of bell; and that, when 
an idea struck him, he naturally rang. We wonder it was not 
added that, like other bells, he naturally rang by the tongue: 
this would have been quite in keeping with the rest, and 
would merely have set more plainly before our minds the 
real character of the whole theory. It fully implies the 
doctrine, which we have shown above to be erroneous, that 


* In his Lectures on the Science of Language, first series, last lecture. 


428 THE “ DING-DONG” THEORY. [ LECT. 


thought tends to burst into expression by an internal 
impulse, instead of under an external inducement; and with 
this it couples the gratuitous assumption that the impulse 
ceased to act when a first start had thus been given to the 
development of human speech. In effect, it explains the 
origin of language by a miracle, a special and exceptional 
capacity having been conferred for the purpose upon the 
first men, and withdrawn again from their descendants, 
The formation of language is never over in any such manner 
as should release an instinct like this from farther service, if 
it really existed in human nature. New cognitions and 
deductions still thrill through the brains of men, yet without 
setting their tongues swinging, any more than their fingers 
working. In all our investigations of language, we find 
nothing which should lead us to surmise that an intellectual 
apprehension could ever, by an internal process, become 
transmuted into an articulated sound or complex of sounds. 
We do, indeed, see that what strongly affects the emotional 
nature prompts utterance, as it also prompts gesture: fear, 
surprise, joy, lead to exclamations; and delight at a new 
cognition might find vent in an interjection; but this inter- 
jection would express the delight, not the cognition ; if lan- 
guage commenced in such a way, the historical beginnings 
of speech would be names of emotions, not of the qualities of 
objects. : 

The fatal weakness of such attempts as this to explain the 
earliest steps in the formation of language lies in the fact 
that they would fain discover there some force at work 
differing entirely from that which directs the whole after- 
course of linguistic development. We, on the contrary, 
_ having fully recognized the truth that all language-making, 
through the long recorded periods of linguistic history, con- 
sists in a succession of attempts to find an intelligible sign for 
a conception which the mind has formed and desires to com- 
municate, must look to find the same principle operative also 
at the very outset of that history. 

Regarding the matter in this light, we shall not fail to see 
clearly what and how much value we are to ascribe to the 
other two theories, the onomatopoetic and the interjectional. 


x1. ] THE IMITATIVE THEORY. 429 


Each of then: furnishes a good and sufficient explanation of 
a part of the facts for which we are seeking to account, 
since each suggests available means by which the first 
speakers should have arrived at mutually intelligible signs. 
Especially great and undeniable are the capabilities of the ono- 
matopoetic principle. We saw in one of our recent illustra- 
tions that, since qualities or acts are the immediate objects 
of the first designations, and since the voice is the appointed 
means of designating, audible acts, utterances or accompany- 
ing noises, would be most naturally chosen to be designated. 
That words have been and may be formed through the 
medium of imitation of natural sounds is palpably true ; 
every language has such to show in its vocabulary. That, 
for example, an animal can be named from its cry, and the 
name thus given generalized and made fertile of derivatives, 
is shown by such a word as cock, which is regarded by ety- 
mologists as an abbreviated imitation of chanticlcer’s cock-a- 
doodle-doo! and from which come, by allusion to the bird’s 
pride and strut, the words coguette, cockade, the cock of 
a gun, to cock one’s eye, to cock the head on one side, a 
cocked hat, and so on. Through all the stages of growth of 
language, absolutely new words are produced by this method 
more than by any other, or even almost exclusively ; there is 
also to be seen an evident disposition to give an imitative 
complexion to words which denote matters cognizable by 
the ear; the mind pleases itself with bringing about a sort 
of agreement between the sign and the thing signified 
Both theory and observed fact, therefore, unite to prove the 
imitative principle more actively productive than any other 
in the earliest processes of language-making. But neither 
is a noteworthy degree of importance to be denied to the 
exclamatory or interjectional principle. It is, beyond all 
question, as natural for the untaught and undeveloped man 
to utter exclamations, as to make gestures, expressive of his 
feelings; and as, in the absence of a voice, the tendency to 
gesture might have been fruitful in suggesting a language of 
significant motions, so we may most plausibly suppose that 
the tendency to exclaim was not without value im aiding men 
to realize that they had in their voices that which was capable 


430 VARIETIES OF THE [LET 


of being applied to express the movements of their spirits, 
Perhaps the principal contribution of exclamations to the 
origin of language was made in this way, rather than by the 
furnishing of actual radical elements: for the latter work, 
their restricted scope, their subjective character, their in- 
fertility of relations, would render them less fitted. 

There is no real discordance between the onomatopoetic 
and interjectional theories, nor do the advocates of either, it 
is believed, deny or disparage the value of the other, or refuse 
its aid in the solution of their common problem. The defini- 
tion of the onomatopoctie principle might be without difficulty 
or violence so widened that it should include the interjec- 
tional. We must, indeed, beware of restricting its action 
toe narrowly. It is by no means limited to a reproduction 
of the sounds of animate and inanimate nature: it admits 
also a kind of symbolical representation—as an intimation of 
abrupt, or rapid, or laborious, or smooth action by utterances 
making an analogous impression upon the ear. A yet more 
subjective symbolism has been sought for among some of the 
earlier constituents of speeeh; it has been suggested, for ex- 
ample, not without a certain degree of plausibility, that the 
pronominal root of the first person in the Indo-European (and 
in many other) languages, ma (our me), has in its internality 
of formation, its utterance with closed lips, as if shutting out 
the external world, a peculiar adapteduess to express one’s 
own personality ; and that the demonstrative ta (which has 
become our that) was prompted by the position it calls for 
in the tongue, which is thrust forward in the mouth, as it 
were to point out the object indicated. Very little of this 
kind, if anything at all, can be satisfactorily made out in the 
material of language; that, however, some degree of such 
subjective correspondence, felt more distinctly in certain 
cases, less so in others, may have sometimes suggested to a 
root-proposer, by a subtile and hardly definable analogy, one 
particular complex of sounds rather than another, as the 
representative of an idea for which he was seeking expression, 
need not be absolutely denied. Only, in admitting it, and 
seeking for traces of its influence, we must beware of 
approximating in any degree to that wildest and most 


x1. | IMITATIVE PRINCIPLE. 431 


absurd of the many vagaries respecting language, the doc- 
trine of the natural and inherent significance of articulate 
sounds. 

It is quite unnecessary that we should attempt to deter- 
mine the precise part played by these principles, or these 
different forms of the onomatopoetic principle, in generating 
the germs of speech. We cannot go far astray, either in 
overestimating or in underestimating the value of each one 
of them, if we bear always distinctly in mind the higher 
principle under which they all alike exercised their influence: 
namely, that the language-makers were not attempting to 
make a faithful depiction of their thought, but only to find 
for ita mutually intelligible sign ; and that everything which 
conduced to such intelligibility would have been, and was, 
resorted to, and to an extent dependent on its degree of 
adaptedness to the purpose—the extent being a fair matter 
for difference of opinion, and for ascertainment by further 
detailed investigation, both theoretical and historical. There 
are many ideas which would be much more clearly intimated 
by a gesture, a grimace, or a tone, than by a word; and, as 
has been already remarked, we cannot doubt that tones,’ 
grimaces, and gestures constituted no small portion of the 
first sign-language, both as independently conveying meaning, 
and as helping to establish the desired association between ar- 
ticulate signs and the ideas which they were intended to signify. 
Language, indeed, never fully outgrows the need of their 
assistance : it is only the most highly developed and culti- 
vated tongues, wielded by the most skilful writers, that can 
make a written passage, even when addressed to the intellect 
alone, as clear and effective as the same would be when 
well uttered, with the addition of due emphasis and inflee- 
tion: and where the emotions and passions are appealed 
to, we have the opinion of one of the greatest word-artists 
of antiquity (Demosthenes) that “action” is far more than 
words. 

We are not, of course, to look upon the imitative signs 
of which we have been treating as servile copies of natural 
sounds, or their exact reproductions. Nothing of that kind 
ig either called for or possible. Inarticulate noises are not 


432 OBLITERATION OF THE SIGNS [ LECT. 


faithfully representable by articulate, nor is more than a dig- 
tant likeness needed in the sign that shall suggest and recall 
them. The circumstances in which a new word is generated 
and used contribute no small part toward its correct appre- 
hension, in the first, as in all the after-stages of linguistic 
growth. The most violent m utilations of form, the most ab- 
surd confusions of meaning, committed upon words by very 
young children, when just learning to talk, do not prevent 
those who are familiar with them from understanding which 
of their contracted circle of ideas they are intending to sig- 
nify: and many a change almost as violent, or a transfer 
almost as distant, has made part of the regular history of 
speech, being justified by the exigency that called it forth, 
and explained by the suggestive conditions of the case. The 
process of language-making was always in a peculiar sense 
a tentative one; a searching after and experimental proposal 
of signs thenceforth to be associated with conceptions. 
There was not less eagerness and intelligence on the part of 
the hearer to catch and apprehend than on that of the 
speaker to communicate; the impulse to a mutual under- 
standing was so strong as to make even a modicum of con- 
nection between sign and sense sufficient for its purpose. 
A wide range of possibilities was thus opened for the desig- 
nation of any given idea, even though resting upon the same 
onomatopoetic ground: as, indeed, the present facts of lan- 
guage show us no little varicty and dissimilarity in the con- 
fessedly imitative names of the same objects. 

That distinct and unequivocal signs of onomatopoetic 
action are not abundantly to be recognized among the earliest 
traceable constituents of our language is no valid argument 
against the truth of that view of the origin of speech which 
we have been defending. It has been a common weakness 
with the upholders of the onomatopoetic theory, and one 
which more than anything else, perhaps, has tended to dis- 
credit them and it with linguistic scholars, that they claim to 
point out too much in detail, endeavouring to find imitative 
etymologies where a more thorough comprehension of the 
facts and a sounder and less prepossessed judgment see an 
‘origin of another and less immediate character. But their 


XI. | OF ONOMATOPOFTIC ORIGIN. 433 


doctrine 1s so impregnably founded in the properly under- 
~ stood favts of linguistic history, and in the necessary con- 
ditions and forces of its earliest period, that they can weil 
afford to be modest, and even reserved, in their attempts to 
explain particulars. Always and everywhere in language, as 
we have abundantly seen in our earlier inquiries into the 
processes of linguistic growth, when once the mutually intel- 
ligible sign is found, its origin is liable to be forgotten and 
obscured. There was doubtless a period in the progress of 
speech when its whole structure was palpably onomatopoetic ; 
but not a long one: the onomatopoetic stage was only a 
stepping-stone to something higher and better. Especially, 
perhaps, was this the case in the language of our own 
branch of the human race, whose nobler endowments must 
have begun very early their career of superior development. 
If we could trace the roots of the other families of language 
back to the same remote stage, we might find in some of 
them more evident traces of the primal imitative condition ; 
we may even yet find the same principle dominant to a much 
higher degree through the whole history of one or other of 
those families than in our own. 

How many may have been the individual proposals of 
signs which were made ineffectively, to be disregarded or 
soon forgotten again, or how many the special signs which 
gained a certain currency in the minor groups of the language- 
making community, but failed to win that general acceptance 
which should make them the germs of a transmitted and 
perpetuated language, we do not and cannot know. Nor 
can we know how numerous, or of what social constitution, 
or in what condition of life, was the community which thus 
formed the speech of a linguistic family or of the whole hu- 
man race; nor how rapid was the accumulation of uttered 
words of general intelligibility, nor how great the store 
gathered by direct imitative process, nor how long the period 
during which they and their like were made to answer the 
purposes of communication, anterior to the beginning of 
structural development. On all such topics as these—as we 
have found occasion to remark before (in the seventh lec- 


ture), when treating of similar subjects—even our g-aesses 
28 


434 REMAINING OBSCURITIES | LECT. 


are now worth nothing, or so nearly nothing as not to deserve 
recording. But we have no reason to suppose that any lan- 
guage of roots alone was ever otherwise than scanty and 
feeble ; those are greatly mistaken who imagine that the be- 
ginnings of speech were produced in a profusion, a super- 
fluity, which later times have rather tempered down and 
economized than increased. We can see clearly also that 
the imitative principle, on the one hand, has its natural 
limits, and, on the other hand, would soon begin to admit 
the concurrence of a new principle of word-making: namely, 
the differentiation and various adaptation of the signs already 
established in use. There would come a time, before very 
long, when a designation of certain ideas would be more 
easily won out of existing material than by the creation of 
new ; and this facility would rapidly increase as the body of 
accepted expression was augmented; until finally the con- 
dition of things was reached which we find prevailing during 
the historical periods of language, when additions to our 
store of expression are almost exclusively elaborated out of 
modes of expression in previous use, and onomatopeeia 1s 
resorted to only in rare and exceptional cases. 

The imitative principle is limited in kind as well as in ex- 
tent of action, and it may sometime become a practical 
inquiry what were the individual conceptions to which the 
first signs were fitted. In the present state of advancement 
of linguistic science, as also of our knowledge of the earliest 
human conditions, such an investigation, though an interest- 
ing one, would doubtless lead to no valuable result. 

The view of language and of its origin which has been 
here set forth will, as I well know, be denounced by many as 
a low view: but the condemnation need not give us much 
concern. It is desirable to aim low, if thereby one hits the 
mark ; better humble and true than high-flown, pretentious, 
and false. A considerable class of linguistic scholars, fearful 
lest they should not otherwise make out language to be a 
sufficiently exalted and sacred thing, confound it with 
thought, and arrogate to the instrumentality a part of the 
attributes which belong only to the agent; thus becoming 
involved in inconsistencies and absurdities, or blinding them- 


xI.] OF THE PXOBLEM. 435 


selves aud those who depend upon them with mystical dog- 
mas, irreducible to the language of fact and common sense. 
Mind and its operations are full of real mystery ; in language, 
there are no mysteries, but only the obscurities and diffi. 
culties inseparable from the rise and development of the 
oldest and most important of all human institutions, 


436 


LECTURE XII. 


Why men alone can speak. Value of speech to man. Training involved 
in the acquisition of language. Reflex influence of language on mind 
and history. Writing the natural aid and complement of speech, 
Fundamental idea of written speech. Its development. Symbolic 
and mnemonic objects. Picture writing. Egyptian hieroglyphs. 
Chinese writing. Cuneiform characters. Syllabic modes of writing. 
The Phenician alphabet and its descendants. Greek and Latin 
alphabets. English alphabet. English orthography. Rank of the 
English among languages. 


Our last inquiries, into the origin of language and the 
nature of its connection with thought, brought us to conclu- 
sions accordant with those we had reached in the course of 
our earlier discussions, and foreshadowed by them. As we 
had found before that the only forces immediately concerned 
in the growth and changes of language were human, so now 
we saw that there was no reason to regard any others as 
having borne a share in its origination: in its incipient 
stage, no less than in its succeeding phases, speech has been 
the work of those whose needs it supplies; it is in no 
other sense of divine origin than as everything which man 
possesses is a divine gift, the product of endowments and 
conditions which are not of his own determining. As, 
further, we had recognized the arbitrariness and convention- 
ality of the means whereby each individual among us signifies 
his conceptions to his fellows—namely, utterances learned by 
each from those among whom his lot chanced to be cast, he 
being forced to speak as thor were in the habit of speaking 


xu. | ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 437 


—so now we perceived that the same qualities had attached 
from the very outset to the signs chosen for expression; 
that, as there is at present no internal and necessary reason 
why we employ one particular complex of sounds rather than 
another as the representative of a particular idea, so there 
had never been any such reason; that words never meant 
thoughts, but always simply designated them. It had form- 
erly appeared to us that, although there has been in every 
case an etymological reason for a word, this reason is one of 
convenience only, founded in the prior acquisitions and 
habitudes of the word-makers; efficient, indeed, at the 
moment of origination of the word, whose association with the 
intended meaning it is instrumental in initiating, but idle 
when the association has once been formed, and therefore 
soon neglected by the language-users, and often forgotten 
beyond power of recovery—and now we were brought to 
acknowledge that the very first words had only a similar 
reason, being such utterances as the natural endowments and 
habits of man, his imitative faculty and his tendency to 
exclaim, made the feasible means of arriving at a mutual 
comprehension between utterer and listener. Onomatopeeia, 
in all its varieties of application, thus came in at the outset, 
aided and supplemented by tone and gesture, to help the lan- 
guage-makers to find intelligible signs, but ceased to control 
the history of each sign when once this had become under- 
stood and conventionally accepted; while the productive 
efficiency of the principle gradually diminished and died out 
as a stock of signs was accumulated sufficient to serve as the 
germs of speech, and to increase by combination and differ- 
entiation, Thus, as mutual intelligibility had been before 
proved to be the only test of the unity of language, and its 
necessity the foree that conserved linguistic unity, it was 
further demonstrated that the desire to understand and be 
understood by one another was the impulse which acted 
directly to call forth language. In all its stages of growth 
alike, then, speech is strictly a social institution; as the 
speaking man, when reduced to solitude, unlearns its use, sO 
the solitary man would never have formed it. We may extol 
as much as we please, without risk of exaggeration, the 


438 WHY MEN ALONE [LECr. 


advantage which each one of us derives from it within his 
inmost self, in the training and equipment of his own powers 
of thought: but the advantage is one we should never have 
enjoyed, save as we were born members of a community: 
the ideas of speech and of community are inseparable. 

By thus tracing back, as well as our knowledge and our 
limited time have allowed, the course of the history of human 
speech even to its very beginning, we have made such answer 
as was within our power to our introductory question, “ Why 
we speak as we do, and not otherwise?” But, before bring- 
ing our discussions to a close, it will be well for us, varying a 
little the emphasis of our inquiry, to present and consider it 
in one or two new aspects. 

And, in the first place, why do we speak—we human 
beings and we alone, and not also the other races of animals 
which have been endowed with faculties in many respects so 
like our own? The fact is a patent one: although some of 
the lower animals are not entirely destitute of the power of 
communicating together, their means of communication is 
altogether different from what we call language. The 
essential characteristic of our speech is that it is arbitrary 
and conventional; that of the animals, on the other hand, is 
natural and instinctive: the former is, therefore, capable of 
indefinite change, growth, and development; the latter is 
unvarying, and cannot transcend its original narrow limits: 
the one is handed down by tradition, and acquired by in- 
struction; the other appears independently, in its inteyrity, 
in every individual of the race. Now, for the superiority of 
man in this particular, the general reason, that his endow- 
ments are vastly higher than those of the inferior races, 
though by no means so definite as could be desired, is per- 
haps the truest and most satisfactory of which the case at 
present admits. When philosophers shall have determined 
precisely wherein lies the superiority of man’s mind, they will 
at the same time have explained in detail his exclusive pos- 
session of speech. We are accustomed to agree that man is 
distinguished from the brute by the gift of reason; but then 
we can only define reason as that whereby man is distin- 
guished from the brute; for as to what reason is, how far it 


xII.] POSSESS LANGUAGE. 439 


is a difference of kind, and how far one of degree only, we 
are quite at a loss to tell. To say that the animal is 
governed by instinct instead of reason does not help the 
difficulty ; it is but giving a name to a distinction of which 
we do not comprehend the nature. Wherever the line may 
require to be drawn between the “blind instinct,” as we 
sometimes style it, of the bee and ant, and the “free intelli- 
gence” of man, that line is certainly long passed when we 
come to some of the higher animals—as, for example, the dog. 
No one can successfully deny to the dog the possession of an 
intelligence which is real, even though limited by bound- 
aries much narrower than those that shut in our own; 
nor of something so akin with many of the nobler qualities on 
which we pride ourselves that their difference is evanescent 
and indefinable. And anything wearing even the semblance 
of intelligence necessarily implies the power to form general 
ideas. It is little short of absurdity to maintain, for instance, 
that the dog, and many another animal, does not fully appre- 
hend the idea of a human being; does not, whenever it sees 
a new individual of the class, recognize it as such, as having 
uke qualities, and able to do like things, with other indivi- 
duals of the same class whom it has seen before. If the crow 
did not comprehend what a man is, why should it be afraid of 
a scarecrow? And how is any application of the results of 
past experience to the government of present action—such 
as the brutes are abundantly capable of—possible without 
the aid of general conceptions? To identify reason, then, 
with the single mental capacity of forming general ideas, and 
to trace the possession of speech directly to this faculty, is, 
in my view, wholly erroneous: it is part of that superficial 
and unsound philosophy which confounds and identifies 
speech, thought, and reason. Speech is one of the most con- 
spicuous and valuable of the manifestations of reason ; but, 
even without it, reason would be reason, and man would be 
mar, though far below what he was meant to become, and is 
capable of becoming through the aid of speech: and there 
are many other things besides talking which man can do in 
virtue of his reason, and which are out of the power of any 
other creature If we are pressed to say in what mode of 


440 VALUE OF LANGUAGE [ LECT. 


action, more than in any other, lies that deficiency in the 
powers of the lower animals which puts language beyond 
their reach, we need have little hesitation in answering that it 
is the inferiority of the command which consciousness in 
them exercises over the mental operations: in their inability 
to hold up their conceptions before their own gaze, to trace 
out the steps of reasoning, to analyze and compare in a 
leisurely and reflective manner, separating qualities and rela- 
tions from one another, so as to perceive that each is capable 
of distinct designation. That many animals come so near to 
a capacity for language as to be able to understand and be 
directed by it when it is addressed to them by man, was 
pointed out in the last lecture; nor can I see that their con- 
dition is destitute of analogy with that of very young 
children, whose power of understanding language is developed 
sooner and more rapidly than their power of employing it; 
who learn to apprehend a host of things before they learn to 
express them. In respect to speech, it is very evident that 
the distance from the oyster, for instance, which no amount 
of training can bring to the slightest apprehension of any- 
thing you may wish to signify to it, to the intelligent and 
docile dog, is vastly greater than that which separates the 
dog from the undeveloped man, or from a man of one of the 
lower and more brutish races. 

But once more, why do we speak ? what is the final cause 
of the gift of language to man? in what way is the possession 
of such a power of advantage to us? These inquiries open a 
great and wide-reaching subject; one far too great, indeed, 
for us to attempt dealing with it, in the contracted space at 
our command, otherwise than in the briefest and most super- 
ficial manner. A detailed reply can be the more easily dis- 
pensed with, inasmuch as, on the one hand, the worth of 
speech is too present to the mind of every one to need to be 
called up otherwise than by a simple allusion; and as, on the 
otaer hand, our previous discussions have brought more or 
less distinctly to view the chief points requiring notice. 

The general answer, in which is summed up nearly the 
whole array of advantages derived from language, is this: 
that it enables men to be, as they are intended to be, social, 


XI. TO THE HUMAN RACE. 44), 


and not merely gregarious beings. As it is the product, so 
it is also the means and instrument, of community. It con- 
verts the human race from a bare aggregate of individuals 
into a unity, having a joint life, a common development, to 
which each individual contributes his mite, receiving an untold 
treasure in return. It alone makes history possible. All 
that man possesses more than the brute is so intimately 
bound up with language that the two are hardly separable 
from one another; and, as we have already seen, are regarded 
by some erroneously, but naturally and excusably, as actually 
identical. Our endowments, so infinitely higher than the 
brute’s, need also, as being so much freer and less instinctive, 
to be brought to our knowledge, to be drawn out and edu- 
cated. The speechless man is a being of undeveloped capa- 
cities, having within him the seeds of everything great and 
good, but seeds which only language can fertilize and bring 
to fruit; he is potentially the lord of nature, the image of 
his Creator ; but in present reality he is only a more cunning 
brute among brutes. There is hardly to be found in the 
whole animal creation any being more ignoble and shocking 
than those wild and savage solitary men, of whom history 
affords us now and then a specimen; but what we are above 
them has been gained through the instrumentality of lan- 
guage, and is the product of a slow progressive accumulation 
and transmission. If each human being had to begin for 
himself the career of education and improvement, all the 
energies of the race would be absorbed in taking, over and 
over again, the first simple steps. Language enables each 
generation to lay up securely, and to hand over to its suc- 
cessors, Its own collected wisdom, its stores of experience, 
deduction, and invention, so that each starts from the point 
which its predecessor had reached, and every individual com- 
mences his career, heir to the gathered wealth of an immea- 
surable past. | 

So far, now, as this advantage comes to us from the hand- 
ing down, through means of speech, of knowledge hoarded up 
by those who have lived before us, or from its communication 
by our contemporaries, we appreciate with a tolerable degree 
of justness its nature and value. We know ful. well that we 


42, EDUCATION RECEIVED [ LECT. 


were born ignorant, and have by hearing and reading pose 
sessed ourselves in a few short years of more enlightenment 
than we could have worked out for our own use in many 
long centuries; we can trace, too, the history of various 
branches of knowledge, and see how they have grown up 
from scanty beginnings, by the consenting labour of innu- 
merable minds, through a succession of generations. We are 
aware that our culture, in the possession of which we are 
more fortunate than all who have gone before us, is the 
product of historical conditions working through hundreds, 
even thousands, of years; that its germs began to be 
developed in the far distant Hast, in ages so remote that 
history and tradition alike fail to give us so much as glimpses 
of their birth; that they were engendered among exception- 
ally endowed races, in especially favouring situations, and 
were passed on from one people to another, elaborated and 
increased by each, until, but a thousand years ago, our own 
immediate ancestors, a horde of uncouth barbarians, were 
ready to receive them in their turn—and that this whole 
process of accumulation and transfer has been made possible 
only by means of speech and its kindred and dependent art 
of record. What we are far less mindful of is the extent to 
which we derive a similar gain in the inheritance of language 
itself, and that this very instrumentality is in like manner 
tne gradually gathered and perfected work of many genera- 
tions—in part, of many races. We do not realize how much 
of the observation and study of past ages is stored up in the 
mere words which we learn so easily and use so lightly, and 
what degree of training our minds receive, almost without 
knowing it, by entering in this way also into the fruits of 
the prolonged labour of others. To this point, then, we owe 
a more special consideration. 

Learning to speak is the first step in each child’s education, 
the necessary preparation for receiving higher instruction of 
every kind. So was it also with the human race ; the acquisi- 
tion of speech constituted the first stage in the progressive 
development of its capacities. We, as individuals, have for- 
gotten both the labour that the task cost us and the enlight- 
enment its successful accomplishment brought us: the whole 


E11. ] IN LEARNING TO SPEAK. 443 


lies too far back in our lives to be reached by our memories ; 
we feel as if we had always spoken, as directly and naturally 
as we have thought. As a race, too, we have done the same 
thing: neither history nor tradition can penetrate to a period 
at all approaching that of the formation of language ; it was 
in the very childhood of our species, and men learned think- 
ing and talking together, even as they learn them now-a- 
days: not till they had acquired through language the art of 
wielding the forces of thought, were they qualified to go on 
to the storing up of various knowledge. Into a few years ot 
instruction are now crowded, for the young student, the net — 
results of as many tens of centuries of toiling after wisdom 
on the part of no small portion of mankind; and, in like 
manner, into the language-learning of the first few months 
and years is crowded the fruit of as many ages of language- 
making. We saw in the last lecture that, if two human 
beings were suffertd to grow up together untaught, they 
would inevitably frame some means of communication, to 
which we could not deny the name of language: but we know 
not how many generations would succeed one another before 
it could reach a fulness comparable with that of even the 
rudest existing human dialects. Men invent language, their 
mental instrument, as truly as they invent the mechanical 
appliances whereby they extend and multiply the power of 
their hands; but it would be as impossible for a man, or a 
generation, to invent a language like one of those which we 
know and use, as, for example, to invent a locomotive engine. 
The invention of the engine may be said to have begun when 
the first men learned how to make a fire and keep it alive 
with fuel; another early step (and one to which many a 
living race has not even yet ascended) was the contriving of a 
wheel ; command was won, by degrees, of the other mechan- 
ical powers, at first in their simplest, then in their more com- 
plicated, forms and applications; the metals were discovered, 
and the means of reducing and working them one after 
another devised, and improved and perfected by long accu- 
mulated experience ; various motive powers were noted and 
reduced to the service of men; to the list of such, it was at 
length seen that steam might be added, .and, after many vain 


44 EDUCATION AND CONSTRAINT [LECT, 


trials, this too was brought to subjection—and thus the work 
was at length carried so far forward that the single step, or 
the few steps, which remained to be taken, were within the 
power of an individual mind. When one of us now under- 
takes to invent a language (as in fact happens from time to 
time), it is as if one who had been all his life an engineer 
should sit down to invent a steam-engine: he does nothing 
but copy with trifling modifications a thing which he ig 
already familiar with ; he reiirranges the parts a little, varies 
their relative dimensions, uses new material for one and 
another of them, and so on—perhaps making some improve- 
ments in matters of minor detail, but quite as probably turn- 
ing out a machine that will not work. To call upon a man 
who has never spoken to produce a complete language is like 
setting a wild Fijian or Fuegian at constructing a power-loom 
or a power-press: he neither knows what it is nor what it 
will be good for, The conditions of the problem which is 
set before the language-makers are manifest: man is placed 
in the midst of creation, with powers which are capable of 
unlocking half its secrets, but with no positive knowledge 
either of them or of himself; with apprehensions as confused, 
with cognitions as synthetic, as are those of the lower 
animals ; and he has to make his way as well as he can to a 
distinct understanding of the world without and the world 
within him. He accomplishes his task by means of a con- 
tinuous process of analysis and combination, whereof every 
result, as soon as it is found, is fixed by a term, and thus 
made a permanent possession, capable of being farther 
elaborated, and communicated by direct instruction. It is 
necessary to study out what needs to be expressed, as well 
as the means. of its expression. Even the naming of concrete 
objects, as we saw, demands an analysis and recognition of 
their distinctive qualities; and to find fitting designations 
for the acts and relations of the external sensible world, and 
taen, by an acute perception of analogies and a cunning 
transfer, to adapt those designations to the acts, states, and 
relations of the intellectual and moral world within the soul, 
was not an easy or rapid process; yet, till this was measur- 
ably advanced, the mind had no instr iment with which it 


X11. ] IN LEARNING LANGUAGE. LAS 


could perform any of the higher work of which it was capa- 
ble. But as each generation transmitted to its successor 
what it had itself inherited from its predecessor, perfected 
and increased by the results of its own mental labour, the 
accumulation of language, accompanying the development of 
analytic thought and the acquisition of knowledge, went 
steadily and successfully forward; until at last, when one 
has but acquired his own mother-tongue, a vocabulary of 
terms and an understanding of what they mean, he already 
comprehends himself and his surroundings ; he possesses the 
fitting instrument of mental action, and can go on intelli- 
gently to observe and deduce for himself. Few of us have 
any adequate conception of the debt of gratitude we owe to 
our ancestors for shaping in our behalf the ideas which we 
now acquire along with the means of their expression, or of 
how great a part of our intellectual training consists in our 
simply learning how to speak. 

One thing more we have to note in connection herewith. 
The style in which we shall do our thinking, the framework 
of our reasonings, the matters of our subjective apprehension, 
the distinctions and relations to which we shall direct our 
chief attention, are thus determined in the main for us, not 
by us. In learning to speak with those about us, we learn 
also to think with them: their traditional habits of mind be- 
come ours. In this guidance there is therefore something of 
constraint, although we are little apt to realize it. Study of 
a foreign language brings it in some measure to our sense. 
He who begins to learn a tongue not his own is at first hardly 
aware of any incommensurability between its signs for ideas 
and those to which he has been accustomed. But the more 
intimately he comes to know it, and the more natural and 
familiar its use becomes to him, so much the more clearly 
does he see that the dress it puts upon his thoughts modifies 
their aspect, the more impossible does it grow to him to 
translate its phrases with satisfactory accuracy into his native 
speech. The individual is thus unable to enter into a com- 
munity of language-users without some abridgment of his 
personal freedom—even tkough the penalty be wholly insig- 
nificant as compared with the accruing benefit. Thus, too, 


446 USE OF LANGUAGE; _LEOT. 


each generation feels always the leading hand, not only of 
the generation that immediately instructed it, but of all who 
have gone before, and taken a part in moulding the common 
speech ; and, not least, of those distant communities, hidden 
from our view in the darkness of the earliest ages, whose 
action determined the grand structural features of each tongue 
now spoken. very race is, indeed, as a whole, the artificer 
of its own speech; and herein is manifested the sum and gen- 
eral effect of its capacities in this special direction of action ; 
but many a one has felt through all the later periods of its 
history the constraining and laming force of a language un- 
happily developed in the first stages of formation; which it 
might have made better, had the work been to do over again, 
but which now weighs upon its powers with all the force of 
disabling inbred habit. Both the intellectual and the histo- 
rical career of a race is thus in no small degree affected by 
its speech. Upon this great subject, however, of the influ- 
ence reflected back from language upon the thought and 
mind of those who learn and use it, we can here only touch; 
to treat it with any fulness would require deep and detailed 
investigations, both linguistie and psychological, for which 
our inquiries hitherto have only laid the necessary foundation, 

The extent to which the different races of men have availed 
themselves of language, to secure the advantages placed 
within their reach by it, is, naturally. and necessarily, as 
various as are the endowments of the races. With some, it 
has served only the low purposes of an existence raised by 
its aid to a certain height above that of the brutes, and re- 
maining stationary there. Their whole native capacity of 
mental development seems to have exhausted itself in the 
acquisition of an amount of language even less than is 
learned by the young child of many another race, as the first 
stage upon which his after-education shall be built up. Their 
life is absorbed in satisfying the demands of the hour; past and 
future arc nothing to them; the world is merely a hunting- 
ground, where means of gratifying physical desires, and of 
lengthening out a miserable existence, may be sought and 
found; its wonders do not even awaken in their minds a 
sense of a higher power; the barest social intercourse, pers 


x11.] COMPLETED BY WRITING. 447 


petuation by instruction of the petty arts of living, and the 
scantiest adaptation to the changes of external circumstances, 
are all they ask of the divine gift of speech. Through such a 
condition as this we may suppose that all human language 
has passed ; but while in parts of the world it still stays there, 
and gives no prospect of a higher development except through 
the influence and aid of races of better gifts and richer ac- 
quisitions, it shows elsewhere every degree of progression, 
up even to the satisfaction of the wants of an advanced and 
advancing culture like our own, where the knowledge of the 
past, aiding the understanding of the present and preparing 
for the future, is laid up in such abundant store, that he 
who studies longest and deepest, and with most appreciative 
and inquisitive industry, hardly does more than realize better 
than his fellows how little he can know of that which is 
known ; how short is life, compared with the almost infinite 
extent of that series of truths, the infinite variety of that 
complication of cognitions, which life puts within our reach, 
and whose apprehension constitutes one of the highest and 
noblest pleasures of life. 

Such full development as this, however, of the uses and 
advantages of speech would be impossible by the instrument- 
ality of spoken speech alone; it demands a farther auxiliary, 
in the possession of written speech. The art of writing is so 
natural a counterpart and complement of the art of speaking, 
it so notably takes up and carries farther the work which 
language has undertaken on behalf of mankind, that some 
consideration of it is well-nigh forced upon us here: our 
view of the history and office of language would otherwise 
lack a part essential to its completeness. Speech and writing 
are equally necessary elements in human history, equally 
growing out of man’s capacity and wants as a social and an 
indefinitely perfectible being. He would be, without lan- 
guage, hardly man at all, a creature little raised above the 
brutes ; without the art of record, his elevation would soon 
find its limits; he could never become the being he was 
meant to be, the possessor of enlightenment, the true lord of 
nature and discoverer of her secrets. Language makes each 
community, each race, a unit; writing tends to bind to- 


4-8 BEGINNINGS OF THE [ LECT. 


gether all races and all ages, forcing the whole of mankind 
to contribute to the education and endowment of every 
individual. Moreover, there is in many respects so close a 
parallelism and analogy between the histories of these tw6 
sister arts, that, were it only for the value of the illustration, 
we should be justified in turning aside for a time to follow 
out the growth of letters. 

As in the case of language, it may be remarked, so also in 
that of writing, we hardly realize, until we begin to investi- 
gate the subject, that the art has had a history at all. It 
seems to us hardly less “ natural” to write our thoughts than 
to speak them: such is the power of educated habit, that we 
take both alike as things of course. But what we have above 
shown to be true of spoken language is still more palpably 
and demonstrably true of written ; it was a slow and laborious 
task for men to arrive at the idea and its realization: more 
than one race has been engaged in the work of elaborating 
for our use the simple and convenient means of record of 
which we are the fortunate possessors; many have been the 
failures or only partial successes which have attended the 
efforts of portions of mankind to provide themselves with such 
means. As it is impossible to trace the history of our own 
alphabet back to its very beginning, some review of those 
efforts will be our best means of inferring what its earliest 
stages of growth must have been, and will prepare us to 
understand what it is, and what are its advantages. * 

We have first to notice that the force which impels to the 
invention of writing, which leads men to represent thought 
by visible instead of audible signs, is the desire to communi- 
cate to a distance, to cut expression loose from its natural 
limitation to the personal presence of him whose thought is 
expressed, and make it apprehensible by persons far away. 
Even the intention of record, of conveying the thought to a 
distance in time also, making it apprehensible by generations 
to come, shows itself only secondarily, as experience suggests 


* In drawing up this sketch of the history of writing, I have to acknow- 
ledge my special obligations to Professor Steinthal’s admirable essay on the 
Bevelopment of Writing (Die Entwickelung der Schrift), published at Berlin, 
in 1852 (Syo, pp. 113). 


x11. | ART OF WRITING. 4.49 


such use ; and as for the advantage which the individual him 

self derives from recording his thought, so as to be able te 
cou it over, to apprehend it and its relations more distinctly, 
as well as that other incalculable advantage which the 
individual and the race derive from the transmission and ac- 
cumulation of knowledge by this means—these are matters 
which are still farther from the minds of the earliest invent- 
ors. Here is a first most notable analogy between the 
histories of spoken and written speech: the satisfaction of a 
simple social impulse, arising out of the ordinary needs 
of intercourse between man and man, brings forth by degrees 
an instrumentality of supreme importance to the progress of 
the whole human race. ‘The earliest writers, like the earliest 
speakers, wrought far more wisely than they knew. 

Again, the conveyance of thought by means of writing was 
not primarily conceived of as a conveyance of the spoken lan- 
guage in which the thought would be expressed: it dealt 
immediately with the conception itself, striving to place this 
by direct means before the apprehension of the person ad- 
dressed. Speech and writing were two independent ways of 
arriving at the same end. We may add that, so long as it 
remains in this stage, writing is a tedious and bungling 
instrumentality; the great step towards its perfection is 
taken when it accepts a subordinate part, as consort and 
helpmate of speech. 

A first teeble effort toward the realization of the funda- 
mental object of writing is to be seen in the custom—not 
infrequent at a certain period of culture, and even retained 
in occasional use among peoples of every grade of civilization 
—of sending along with a messenger some visible object, 
symbolical of his errand, and helping both to authenticate 
and to render it impressive. Thus, the prophet Jeremiah 
(Jeremiah, ch. xix.) is directed to take an earthen bottle and 
break it before the ancients of his people, to signify the sud- 
den and irremediable destruction with which he is to threaten 
them. Thus ambassadors and heralds in ancient times were 
charged with the delivery of something typical of the peace 
or war they were sent to proclaim. And the knight’s glove, 
tirown down in defiance and taken up by him who accepta 

29 


450 SYMBOLIC AND MNEMONIC OBJECTS. [LECE 


the challenge, and the staff still broken in Germany over the 
head of the condemned criminal, are instances of the same 
general style of instrumentality for expressing meaning. 
Objects, too, are used in a more arbitrary and conventional 
way, as reminders, helps to the recollection of that which is 
communicated orally. So the North American Indian, on 
solemn occasions, had his strips of wampum, corresponding 
to the heads of the discourse he had prepared; and handed 
them over, one after another, as each announcement was 
made or each argument finished, to the person addressed, 
We should hardly need to take any notice of a method of 
intimation so rude and indefinite as this, but for the develop- 
ment which we know it to have attained, as a practical means 
of communication and record, in the usage of one or two 
nations. It received its greatest elaboration in the system 
of the guippos, or knotted cords, employed in Peru at the 
time of its discovery and conquest. With these cords the 
state messengers were provided, and by their numbers, their 
colours, their groupings, their style of knotting, they were 
made conventionally significant of each one’s message, even 
to partial independence of his own oral explanation. The 
accounts, and, to a certain extent, the annals also, of the 
empire of the Incas are claimed to have been intelligibly 
kept by means of the guippos. The Peruvians doubtless 
made out of this coarse instrumentality all that it was 
capable of becoming’ but the essentially low grade of their 
capacity and culture is indicated by the fact that they had 
risen to the invention of nothing better. The Chinese, too, 
curiously enough, have preserved the tradition that their 
earliest ancestors wrote by means of knotted cords, until the 
mythical emperor Fo-hi devised the beginnings of the better 
system of which we shall have presently to speak. 

A higher degree of ingenuity, and a greatly superior ca- 
pacity of progression and development, are to be seen in the 
contrivance of a picture-writing. This, in its simplest 
form, is found all over the world, among peoples of a certain 
degree of civilization. Let us look at an example furn- 
ished by the aborigines of our own country.* 


* It is one of those given by Steinthal, who extracts it from Schooleraft’s 
work on the Indian Tribes, vol. i. p. 352. 


x11.] PICTURE-WRITING. 451 


Two hunters have gone up the river on an expedition, and 
have killed a bear and taken many fish. They endeavour to 
commemorate their success, and make it known to whosoever 
shall pass that way after them, by a monument raised upon 
the spot. On a piece of wood they draw two boats, and 
over each the totem, or symbolic animal, indicating the 
family to which each hunter respectively belongs—his sur- 
name, as it were. The figures of a bear and of half-a-dozen 
fish tell the rest of the simple story. There is here no idea 
of a narrative, of an orderly setting forth of the successive 
incidents making up an act or occurrence: the whole com- 
plex is put before the eye at once, unanalyzed, in the form 
in which we might suppose it to lie in the mind of a brute— 
or, more properly, as it would lie in the mind of a man desti- 
tute of language, and lacking that education in progressive 
thought which the possession and use of language give ; it 
abnegates, in short, the advantages conferred by language, 
and is confusedly synthetic, like the conceptions of an un- 
taught human being. It offers but one element implying 
a possibility of something higher—namely, the totems, which 
are signs, not for things, but for the conventional and com- 
municable names of things: here is contained in embryo the 
idea of a written language representing speech, and such 
might be made to grow out of it, if the picture-writers had 
but the acuteness to perceive *t and the ingenuity to make 
the conversion. . 

The pictorial mode of writing is analogous with that primi- 
tive stage of language in which all signs are still onomato- 
poetic, immediately suggestive of the conceptions they desig- 
nate, and therefore, with due allowance for the habits and 
knowledge of those who use them, intelligible without in- 
struction. To the most prominent and important difference 
between the two allusion was made in the last lecture: in 
virtue of the character of the medium through which com- 
munication is made, the earliest written signs denote concrete 
‘objects, while the earhest spoken signs denote the acts and 
qualities of objects. | 

One of the American nations, the Mexican, had brought 


the art of picture-writing to a high state of perfection, 
29 * 


452 MEXICAN AND [ LECT. 


making it serve the needs of a far from despicable civilization. 
The germ of a superior development which we saw in the 
totem-figures of the Indian depiction was in their use made 
to a certain extent fruitful. Every Mexican name, whether 
of place or person, was composed of significant words, 
and could in most cases be signified hieroglyphically— 
just as we, for instance, might signify ‘Mr. Arrowsmith, of 
Hull, by an arrow and a human figure holding a hammer, 
placed within or above the hull of a vessel. So also, the 
periods, of greater or less length, which made up their intric- 
ate and skilfully constructed calendar, all derived their appel- 
lations from natural objects, and were intimated in writing 
by the figures of those objects. Thus the Mexican annals 
were full of names and dates composed of figures designating 
the spoken signs of things; and the idea of a hieroglyphic 
method of writing, which should found itself on spoken lan- 
guage, following the progress of oral narration and attempt- 
ing to signify this alone, lay apparently within their easy 
reach; and would, possibly, have been reached in due time, 
had the Mexican culture been allowed to continue its career 
of progress uninterfered with. Authorities are somewhat at 
variance, indeed, as to what was the real condition and cha- 
racter of the Mexican picture-writing at the time of the 
Conquest, some holding that it had already become a repre- 
sentation of continuous spoken texts. That there was a 
quite extensive Mexican literature is certain; but the ignor- 
ant fanaticism and superstition of the Spanish conquerors 
almost swept it out of existence, destroying at the same 
time the key to its comprehension, which has not yet been 
fully recovered. 

In Egypt, the same beginnings have grown into an institu- 
tion of quite a different character. The Egyptian hiero- 
glyphs, in even the very earliest monuments preserved to us, 
form a completely elaborated system, of intricate constitu- 
tion and high development; it undergoes hardly a perceptible | 
change during all the long period covered by the monumental 
records: yet its transparency of structure is such that it 
exhibits in no small degree, like the grammatical structure 
of the Sanskrit language, its own history. In its origin and 


xII. | EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS. 453 


application, it is peculiarly a commemorative and monu- 
mental mode of writing, and it retains to the last strictly its 
pictorial form ; every one of its separate signs is the repre 
sentation of some visible object, however far it may be re- 
moved in use from being a designation of that object. It is 
in this respect like a language which has never forgotten 
the derivation of its words, or corrupted their etymological 
form, however much it may have altered their meaning. On 
the Egyptian monuments are found, accompanied and de- 
scribed by the hieroglyphics, many and various pictorial 
scenes—such as kings besieging cities or leading trains of 
captives, individuals making offerings to divinities, souls un- 

ergoing judgment and retribution, and other the like—all 
of which are cast in conventional form, and often contain 
symbolic elements : their intent is much more didactic than 
artistic ; they are meant to inform rather than to illustrate : 


_ these, then, are with evident plausibility assumed still to repre- 


sent the earliest, purely pictorial, stage of Egyptian writing, 
corresponding with that illustrated above by an example 
furnished by our own aborigines; while the hieroglyphs grew 
out of the attempt—also finding its analogue in the totem- 
figures of that example, and still more filly in the Mexican 
delineations—to designate and explain the persons and 
actions depicted. The ways in which this end was attained, 
and figured signs made indicative of names and abstract ideas, 
were various: homonymy and symbolism were both fertile of 
characters: thus, the name of the god Osiris, Hesiri, was 
written by the two figures of a kind of seat (?), hes, and an 
eye, wz; the figure of a basket, ned, signified also neb, ‘a 
lord:’ a hand pouring libations from a vase meant ‘ offer in 
sacrifice ;’ an extended hand bearing some object meant /2, 
‘give;’ the wallowing hippopotamus denoted ‘filth, inde- 
cency;’ and so on. But the Egyptians showed in this part 
of the development of their system a much higher aptitude 
than’ the Mexicans for analytic representation, for parallel 
ing, and then identit'ying, the process of writing with that of 
speaking. In the first place, they came to be able to write 
symbolically such a sentence as “ Young! old! God hates 
indecency,” by the five figures of a child, an old man, a hawk, 


454 EGYPTIAN [ LECT. 


a fish, a hippopotamus, placed one after the other, while the 
Mexican would have given a synthetic symbolic representa- 
tion of the action by a picture of the Great Spirit chastising 
an evil-doer, or in some other like way. But, in the second 
place, the Egyptian system had taken the yet more important 
step—one which, if followed up, would have brought it to 
the condition of a real alphabet—of indicating simple sounds, 
pzonetic elements, by a part of its figures. That such a step 
lies not far off from the homonymic designation of a thing by 
something which called to the mind the sounds of which its 
name was composed, is evident enough; still, no little insight 
and tact was needed in order to bridge over and cross the 
interval, and we do not apprehend ’so fully as we could desire 
the details of the movement. It appears, however, that the 
figure of an object was first made to designate some other 
conception whose name agreed with its own in the conso- 
nantal elements, to the exclusion of the more variable vowels ; 
and then, by a farther abstraction, instead of designating 
thus a part of the phonetic elements of its own name, it 
came to signify the initial element only, whether consonant 
or vowel. For example, the figure of a lion, Jabo, is used to 
represent 1; that of an eagle, ahom, to represent a. Proper 
names are written almost exclusively in this style of cha- 
racters, and the decipherment of the names Ptolemy and 
Cleopatra on the inscription of the famous Rosetta stone, as 
set down distinctly in pure phonetic signs, was the first step 
in our recovery of the key to the hieroglyphs. In ordinary 
texts, the phonetic, homonymic, and symbolical characters 
are intricately mingled, variously aiding, explaining, and sup- 
plementing one another’s meaning. Thus, the signs for 
Osiris (Hesirz), already given, are always accompanied by 
the figure of a peculiar hammer or hatchet, which some un- 
known reason has made one of the standard symbols of 
divinity ; the verb ti, ‘give,’ having been once written pho- 
netically, has the symbolic outstretched arm with gift added 
by way of farther explanation ; and so on. 

In monumental, and to some extent also in literary use, 
the hieroglyphs maintained, as already remarked, their picto- 
rial form unaltered, as long as the kingdom and civilization 


xif.] MODES OF WRITING. 455 


of Egypt lad an existence: reverence for ancient custom, as 
well as their peculiar adaptedness to the purposes of archi- 
tectural decoration, to which they were-so largely applied, 
preserved them from corrupting change. But how easily, 
under the exigencies of familiar practical use, a true alphabet 
might have grown out of this cumbrous, long-winded, and 
intricate mode of writing, is shown in the history of its two 
derivative forms, the hieratic, and the demotic or enchorial, 
The former, the hieratic, is simply an abbreviated and cursive 
style of hieroglyphic, in which each figure is represented by 
a part of its outline, or otherwise so altered as to be hardly 
recognizable. It was the common written character of the 
priests and sacred scribes, from a very early period. The 
demotic was a still later adaptation of the same, and has lost 
all relics of a pictorial character, being composed of a limited, 
though large and unwieldy, number of arbitrary signs, chiefly 
phonetic. What farther improvement and reduction toward 
a true alphabetic form the demotic might in time have under- 
gone, we cannot tell. For Greek influence and Christianity 
came in to interrupt the regular course of development; 
the Christian Coptic literature, casting aside the native 
modes of writing, adopted a new alphabet, founded upon the 
Greek, 

The history of writing in China, although its final products 
are in appearance so different from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, 
goes back to a very similar origin. The Chinese themselves, 
with that love for historical research and record and the 
explanation of subsisting institutions which has always dis- 
tinguished them, have set down for our benefit all the steps 
of the process by which their immense and unique system of 
signs has been elaborated out of its scanty beginnings; and 
both product and. process present more numerous and strik- 
ing analogies with spoken language and its growth than are 
to be found anywhere else in the whole history of written 
characters. We have already noticed the Chinese tradition 
that their earliest ancestors used knotted cords as a means of 
communication and record. Their first written signs were 
no development out of these, but a substitution for them 
They were, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, simple pictures of - 


456 THE CHINESE [ LECT. 


the objects represented: such are, in fact, the beginnings of 
every system of written signs for thought, not less necessarily 
than onomatopoetic utterances, designating acts and qualities, 
are the beginnings of every system of spoken signs. Thus, 
the sun was denoted by a circle with a point within, the 
moon by a crescent, a mountain by a triple peak, a tree and 
a man by rude figures representing their forms, and so on. 
Signs were provided thus for a considerable number of 
natural objects; those, namely, which are most familiarly 
noted and most easily depicted. But such cannot supply 
otherwise than in small part the needs of a written language, 
any more than onomatopoetic signs those of a spoken lan- 
guage. Their store was notably increased by the com- 
pounding of two or more simple signs; as the vocabulary of 
a language by the composition of spoken elements. For 
example, the signs for ‘ mountain’ and ‘man,’ put together, 
signified ‘hermit;’ those for ‘eye’ and ‘water’ signified 
‘tear;’ those for ‘woman,’ ‘hand,’ and ‘broom,’ meant 
‘housekeeper.’ A simple symbolism often came in to aid, 
both in the case of single and of compound signs. A banner 
pointing one way signified ‘left;’ the other way, ‘right ;’ 
an ear between two doors gave the meaning of ‘listen;’ 
‘sun’ and ‘moon,’ taken together, indicated ‘ light ;’ mouth’ 
and ‘bird’ made up ‘song,’ and so on. This is equivalent 
to the transfer of meaning of a word, effected through a 
simple association. But the most abundant means of multi- 
plication of the resources of Chinese expression was found in 
the introduction of a phonetic principle, and the combination 
of phonetic and ideographic elements into a compound sign. 
The language, as we saw in the ninth lecture, is full of 
homonyts, words identical in phonetic form but of different 
meaning: a sign being found for a word in one of its many 
senses, either by direct representation or by symbolism, the 
device was very naturally suggested of making the same sign 
answer for some of its other meanings also, by the aid of an 
appended diacritical sign. It was quite as if we, for instance, 
had learned to signify sownd in “safe and sound” symbol- 
ically by a circle (as being peculiarly the complete, unbroken 
figure), and had then suffered it to represent the same 


XII. ] MODE OF WRITING. 457 


phonetic compound in its other senses, distinguishing each 
by some suggestive mark: thus, adding an ear on either side 
might make it signify ‘sound, audible noise;’ a sign for 
‘water’ written within it would intimate the meaning of 
‘sound, an arm of the sea;’ a depending line and plummet, 
that of ‘sound, to try the depth of anything.” For example, 
there is in China a certain simple sign having the pronuncia- 
tion pe, and meaning ‘ white’ (what the object represented 
is, and in virtue of what property it was chosen to signify 
this conception, is now no longer known); then, with the 
sign for ‘tree’ prefixed, it means ‘pe, a kind of cypress ;’ 
with the sign for ‘man,’ it means ‘pe, elder brother;’ with 
the sign for ‘ manes,’ it means ‘pe, the vital principle in its 
existence after death ;’ and so forth. Some signs are thus 
very extensively used to form compound characters, in con- 
nection with various others that bear a phonetic value in the 
compound ; two of those already instanced are among the 
most common of them: the sign for ‘man’ enters into nearly 
six hundred combinations, all denoting something that has a 
special relation to man; that for ‘tree’ enters into more 
than nine hundred, which denote kinds of trees, wood and 
things made of’ wood, and such like matters. Their analogy 
with the formative elements of spoken language is very 
evident; they are signs which limit the general value of the 
phonetic radical, putting it in a certain class or category of 
meanings. 

The Chinese mode of writing, unlike the Egyptian, has 
been ready to forget and lose sight of its hieroglyphic origin, 
to convert its characters, when once the needed association 
was formed between them and their significance, into signs 
wholly conventional, bearing no traceable resemblance to the 
objects they originally depicted, and made liable to any 
modifications which practical convenience, or a sense for 
symmetry, or mere fancy, should suggest and recommend. 
In this, again, it offers a manifest analogy with what we have 
repeatedly shown to be the legitimate and laudable tendency 
of spoken language. The characters have passed through a 
variety of transitional forms on their way to that in which 
they are at present ordinarily written, and which was itself 


¥ 


458 CHINESE WRITING. [ LECT. 


established more than a thousand years since : some of these 
intermediate forms are still preserved in monuments and 
ancient documents, and to a certain extent even now em- 
ployed for special uses—as the older phases of many a spoken 
tongue are kept to the knowledge of posterity by lke 
means; and as a Frenchman, for example, of the present day 
may clothe his thoughts, upon occasion, in an Old French or 
a Latin dress. Their current shape has been determined 
mainly by the customary instruments of writing and the 
manner of their use—these have exercised all the modifying 
and adapting force which in a spoken tongue belongs to a 
powerful euphonic tendency, like that which has made all 
Italian words end in vowels, and has worn off from French 
yoeables the syllables which followed after the accented one 
in their Latin originals. And so thoroughly has their hiero- 
glyphic origin been covered up and concealed by thege trans- 
formations that no one, from their present aspect, would 
venture even to conjecture that they had started from out- 
lines of natural objects; nor would the older preserved 
documents suffice to prove this; the truth lay only within 
reach of the Chinese themselves, as having access to tradi- 
tional information from yet more ancient times. We have 
no right to be surprised, then, if the onomatopoetic begin- 
nings of speech, dating from a period compared with which 
the origin of Chinese writing is but as yesterday, are no 
longer to be distinctly traced in the worn and altered facts 
of such language as is now accessible to our researches. 
Another set of causes has powerfully influenced the de- 
velopment of the Chinese written expression: namely, the 
poverty of the spoken tongue, and the felt need of giving it 
an aid and support from without. The system of signs com- 
bines a phonetic and ideographic nature in a manner 
peculiarly its own. It is rather an auxiliary language, than 
a reduction of speech to writing. It supplies the defects 
and removes the ambiguities of the language it represents ; 
it might be learned and used without any regard paid to its 
phonetie equivalents ; and if the Chinese were but willing to 
forego converse by the tongue and ear, substituting for them 
the hand and eye, it would answer the purposes of their 


i 


x11. | CUNEIFORM CHARACTERS. 459 


communication vastly better, with its forty thousand signe for 
ideas, than the spoken means now chiefly employed, with its 
scant thousand or two. While the uttered vocabulary of the 
Chinese is one of the poorest in the world, their written one 
is eminently rich and abundant. This farther analogy with 
spoken languages it has, that, as was in the first lecture 
(p. 18) shown to be true of the latter, only a part of its 
resources are required for the ordinary uses of life: not 
more than eight or ten thousand of its characters are other- 
wise than very rare, and all common needs are supplied by 
from three to five thousand. 

One more important mode of writing is said to be dis. 
tinctly . traceable to a hieroglyphic origin : namely, the 
cuneiform, the character of the monuments of Mesopotamia 
and the neighbouring countries. Its signs are made up of 
various combinations of wedge-shaped elements: hence the 
name “cuneiform” (from Latin euneiformis, ‘wedge-shaped’); 
they are also sometimes called « arrow-headed characters,” 
from the same peculiarity. There are several different 
cuneiform alphabets, the older of them being exceedingly 
intricate and difficult, made up of phonetic, ideographic, and 
symbolic signs, variously intermingled ; and sometimes far- 
ther complicated, it is said, with combinations which were 
phonetic in the language for which they were originated, and 
have been transferred to the use of another with their old 
meaning, but a different spoken value (somewhat, as has been 
pointed out, as we write viz., an abbreviation of Latin 
videlicet, and read it “ namely”). Much that regards the his- 
tory and relations of the different systems of cuneiform cha- 
racters is, and may always remain, obscure: but jt is con- 
fidently claimed that evidences are found which prove their 
beginnings to have been pictorial ; and the peculiar form of 
their component elements is fully recognized asa consequence 
of the way in which they were originally written—namely, 
by pressure of the corner of a square-ended instrument upon 
tablets of soft clay ; these being afterwards dried or burned, 
to make the record permanent. That, through such inter- 
mediate steps even as these, a hieroglyphic system may 
finally pass over into one truly alphabetic, is shown by the 


460 | SYLLABIC METHODS. [LEcT. 


derivation from the Mesopotamian cuneiform of the Persian, 
which is by far the simplest and the best understood of all 
the systems of its class, being purely phonetic and almost 
purely alphabetic. It contains about thirty-five signs of 
simple sounds, some of those for the consonants being par- 
tially of a syllabic character—that is to say, being different 
according as the consonant was to be followed by one’ or an- 
other vowel. In this simpler cuneiform are written the 
Achemenidan inscriptions, of which we have already more 
than once had occasion to take notice, as preserving to us an 
Indo-European dialect. The history of its formation is un- 
known. 

I have called the Achemenidan cuneiform a partially syl- 
labie mode of writing; and syllabic systems have played so 
important and prominent a part in the general history of 
writing—in the main, traceably as derivatives from methods 
of a different character—that it is necessary for us to pay 
them here a little special attention. A pure syllabic alpha- 
bet is one whose letters represent syllables, instead of articu- 
lations; which makes an imperfect phonetic analysis of 
words, not into the simple sounds that compose them, but 
into their syllabic elements; which does not separate the 
vowel from its attendant consonant or consonants, but de- 
notes both together by an indivisible sign. Such an analysis 
is more natural and easy to make than one which distin- 
guishes all the phonetic elements—especially in the case of 
languages of a simple structure, which do not favour difficult 
consonantal combinations, and therefore make up but a limited 
number of syllables. Many times, accordingly, when some 
race has made acquaintance with the art of writing as prac- 
tised by another, and, instructed and incited by the latter’s 
example, has set about representing its own spoken tongue 
by written signs, it has fallen first upon the syllabic method. 
One of the most noted alphabets of this kind is the Japanese 
kata-kana, or trofa (so called from the names of its first 
signs, like alphabet, from alpha, beta), to which we have 
already once had occasion to allude (in the ninth lecture) : 
it was made out of fragments of Chinese characters, and con- 
tained forty-seven different signs, one for each of the syl- 


XII. ] ANCIENT SEMITIC ALPHABET. 461 


lables of which the Japanese words were made up: for the 
spcken alphabet of the language then included only ten 
consonants and five vowels, and no syllable contained more 
than one vowel, with a single preceding consonant. A 
similar alphabet was devised for the Cherokee language, not 
many years ago, by an ingenious member of the tribe, George 
Guess, who, though he had never learned to read English, had 
seen and possessed English books, and knew in general what 
was their use: it contained eighty-five signs, mostly fashioned 
out of English letters, though with total disregard of their 
original value. 

Another and a less pure form of syllabic alphabet is that 
which treats the consonant alone as the substantial part of 
the syllable, and looks upon the vowel as something of sub- 
ordinate consequence—as it were, a colouring or affection of 
the consonant. In its view, then, only the consonant has a 
right to be written, or to be written in full; the accompany- 
ing vowel, if taken note of at all, must be indicated by some 
less conspicuous sign, attached to the consonant. Peculiar 
and arbitrary as this mode of conceiving of the syllable may 
seem to us, it is historically of the highest importance; for 
apon it was founded the construction of the ancient Semitic 
alphabet, which has been the parent of the methods of writing 
used by the great majority of enlightened nations, since the 
beginning of history. It is not difficult to see how the cha- 
racter of Semitic language should have prompted, or at least 
favoured, such an estimate of the comparative value of vowel 
and consonant. In Semitic roots and words (as was explained 
in the eighth lecture), the consonants are the principally sig- 
nificant, the substantial, element; the vowels bear a subor- 
dinate office, that of indicating, as formative elements, the 
modifications and relations of the radical idea; the former are 
stable and invariable, the latter liable to constant change. 
Perhaps we should not be going too far, if we were to say that 
only a language so constructed could have originally suggested 
such an alphabet. Be this as it may, the ancient Semitie 
alphabet—of which the Phenician is the generally accepted 
type, being, whether original or not, its oldest traceable form 
-—was a system of twenty-two signs, all of them possessing 


462 PHENICIAN ALPHABET (LECT. 


consonantal value: three, however—namely, the signs for the 
semi-vowels y and w, and for what we may call the “smooth 
breathing ’—partaking somewhat of a vowel character, and 
being under certain circumstances convertible into represent- 
atives of the vowels, 7, #, and a. 

The Phenician alphabet was thus strictly and exclusively 
a phonetic system, though one of a peculiar and defective 
type. We cannot possibly regard it, therefore, as an imme- 
diate and original invention ;~ it must have passed, in the 
hands either of the Semites themselves or of some other people, 
through the usual preliminary stages of a pictorial or hiero- 
glyphie mode of writing. More probably, its elements were 
borrowed from one or another of the nations, of yet earlier civil- 
ization, by whom we know the Semitic races to have been sur- 
rounded, before they entered on t' sir own historic career. The 
traditional names of its characters are the recognizable appella- 
tions of natural objects, and each name has for its initial letter 
that sound which is designated by the character: thus, the sign 
for } is called beth, ‘house;’ that for g, gimel, ‘camel ;’ that 
for d, daleth, ‘door ;’ in some cases, moreover, a degree of re- 
semblance is traceable between the form of the letter and the 
figure of the object whose name it bears. This, so far as it 
goes, would evidently point toward that application of the 
hieroglyphie principle which, as we saw above (p. 454), made 
the figures of the lion and eagle represent in Egyptian use 
the letters 7 and a. The subject of the ultimate history of 
the Phenician alphabet, however, is too obscure and too much 
controverted for us to enter here into its discussion; investi- 
gations of it have reached hitherto no satisfactory results. 

The diffusion which this alphabet and its derivatives have 
attained is truly wonderful. From it come, directly or ine 
directly, the three principal Semitic alphabets, the Hebrew, 
the Syriac, and the Arabic, the last of which has gained 
currency over no inconsiderable part of the Old World, being 
employed by nations of diverse race, Indo-European (Persian, 
Afghan, and Hindustani), Scythian (Turkish), and Polynesian 
(Malay); while the Syriac has spread, through the Uigur 
Turkish, Mongol, and Manchu, to the farthest north-eastern 
Asia. The eastern Iranian and the Indian alphabets have 


XL] AND ITS DERIVATIVES. 463 


been traced, though more doubtfully, to the same source; and 
India, especially, has been a home where it has developed into 
new and richer forms, and whence it has been extended over 
a vast region, in Asia and the islands lying southward from 
Asia—reaching at last, in its remote derivatives, conditions as 
unlike to the original and to one another as are the late 
dialects of a widely disseminated family of languages. In 
nearly all these countries, through all its various metamor- 
phoses, it has held fast, in the main, to its primitive character 
of a consonantal alphabet, with omission, or with partial or 
subordinated designation, of the vowels. But in its progress 
in the other direction, toward Europe, it fell first into the 
hands of the Greeks; and from them it received its final per- 
fection, by the provision of signs enabling it to represent the 
vowels not less distinctly than the consonants. In the Greek 
alphabet, for the first time in all our review of the history of 
written speech, we find realized what we cannot but regard as 
the true ideal of a mode of writing—namely, that it be simply 
a faithful representation of spoken speech, furnishing a visible 
sign for every audible sound that the voice utters, not attempt- 
ing to distinguish any class of sounds as of more importance 
than another, nor to set itself up as an independent instru- 
mentality for the conveyance of thought by overpassing the 
limits of utterance, and assuming to give more or other than 
the voice gives in speaking. 

From the Greek alphabet have been derived, by modifica- 
tions and adaptations of greater or less consequence, several 
others, used by peoples of each of the grand divisions of the 
eastern continent—as the Coptic of later Egypt, already 
referred to, and the Armenian; the runes of some of the 
Germanic tribes also, and the early Celtic modes of writing, 
trace their origin back to it, mainly through the Latin; as 
does the modern Russian, the most ungainly and unsymmetri- 
cal, perhaps, of all its descendants. But the Latin alphabet 
itself is beyond all comparison the most important of its 
derivative forms. The Greek colonies of southern Italy were 
the means of bringing Greek letters to the knowledge of the 
inhabitants of the peninsula, and several of the Italian nations 
—-the Etruscans, Umbrians. and Oscans, as well as the Latins 


464 THE GREEK ALPHABET. [ LECT. 


—provided themselves with alphabets derived from the Greek. 
All these excepting the last have passed away, along with the 
nationalities and languages to which they belonged; but the 
Latin alphabet has become the common property of nearly all 
the enlightened nations of modern times whose civilization is 
derived from that of Greece and Rome; while, under European 
influence, its use has also extended and is extending among 
the races of inferior endowments and culture, even crowding 
out, to some extent, their indigenous and less convenient 
modes of writing. 

Our examination of the history of writing might here 
properly enough be closed; yet the particular interest which 
we take in our own alphabet will justify us in delaying a 
little, to note the principal steps of the process by which it 
has been derived from the Phenician—so far, at least, as it is 
possible to do this without graphic illustration. We shall 
also thus see more clearly how a borrowed system is wont to 
be modified and expanded, in passing from the service of one 
language into that of another. There is never a precise 
accordance between the phonetic systems, the spoken alpha- 
bets, of any two languages, so that a written alphabet which 
suits the one can be immediately applied to the other’s uses; 
and hence the history of every scheme of characters which has 
won a wide currency, among various nations, presents a 
succession of adaptations, more or less wisely and skilfully 
made. 

The chief change wrought upon the Phenician alphabet by 
the Greeks consisted, as has been already pointed out, in the 
provision of signs for the vowels. The Semitic tongues, as com- 
pared with the Greek, were characterized by an excess of 
guttural and sibilant sounds: the superfluous signs represent- 
ing these, then, were put to divers new uses in “Greece ; ; our 
A, “E, and O were to the Phenicians designations of certain 
guttural breathings, having the value of consonants ; the semi- 
vowel y being wanting in Greek, its sign was greatly altered 
and simplified to form our I; the sign for w was retained by 
the early Greeks as the py y (though abandoned later) ;° 
for u, they invented a wholly new character, V or Y (which 
are by origin only varying graphic forms of the same letter). 


x11. | THE LATIN ALPHABET. 468 , 


The other Greek alterations and additions may be passed over, 
as of less account. 

The Latin alphabet was taken from one of the older forms 
of the Greek, before the characters of the latter had assumed 
in all points the form and value with which we are most 
familiar—when the H, for example, had still its value as a 
breathing, and had not been converted into a long 4 The 
system of spoken sounds for which the Latin required written 
representatives was but a simple one: to the fifteen articula- 
tions which, as we saw in the seventh lecture (p. 265), had been 
the primitive possession of the Indo-European family, it had 
added but three, the medial vowels e and 0, and the labial 
spirant f (it had, indeed, the semivowels y and w also, but did 
not distinguish them in writing from the vowels ¢ and w, with 
which they are so nearly identical: I and J, U and V, are but 
graphic variations of the same sign). Nearly all the Latin 
letters are the same with the Greek, or differ from them only 
by slight diversities of form: but one or two points of dis- 
cordance need a word of explanation. The Latin system is 
most peculiar in rejecting the K, which was found in every 
Greek alphabet, of whatever period or locality, and in writing 
both its % and g sounds at first by a single letter, C, the 
ancient sign for the g-sound only: then, when it came to it- 
self, and felt again the need of a separate designation for each, 
it knew no better than to retain the C for the &-sound, and to 
add a diacritical mark at its lower end, making a G, for the 
purpose of denoting the corresponding sonant, g. By asome- 
what similar process of transfer, we have come to write the 
p-sound by the sign, P, which formerly belonged to the r: | 
when the older sign for p, I’, had assumed a shape so nearly 
agreeing with the P that the two were not readily distinguished 
from one another, a tag was hung upon the crook of the latter 
as a further diacritical mark, and it was thus made into R. 
For the f-sound, the ancient sign for w, the Greek digamma, 
F, was somewhat arbitrarily adopted, its only special recom- 
mendation being that both w and f were labials. The Q 
represents an old Phenician letter, a deeper guttural than &, 
rejected by the later Greek alphabets as superfluous—and 
really no better than superiluous in the Latin, where the pro- 

30 


466 THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. [ LECT. 


nunciation of the £-sound before w did not differ enough from 
its pronunciation before @ and o to call for an independent 
notation. Of the remaining three Latin letters, the X is a 
Greek invention (used in some Greek alphabets also with its 
Latin value, or representing ai, instead of chz), and, as stand- 
ing for the double sound fs, not less needless than @; Y and 
Z are later importations out of the Greek alphabet, and used 
only in Greek words, to signify peculiar Greek sounds (the 
Greek wpsilon having by this time changed its value of w for 
that of the French uw, German i). 

The changes which we, in our turn, have introduced into 
the. Latin alphabet, in adapting it to our purposes, are not in- 
significant, although far from being enough to make it repre- 
sent our spoken language as fully and consistently as it 
formerly did that of the Romans. Besides the eighteen 
articulations of the early Romans, we have (as was shown 
above, in the third lecture) at least fourteen others which 
call more or less imperatively for separate designation. There 
are the a of cat and care, the a of what and all, and the wu of 
cut and curl; there are the two semi-vowel sounds, y and w, 
the palatal nasal (which we commonly write with zg, as in 
singing), the three sibilants, z, sh, and zh (the z of azure), the 
two sounds of ¢h, in thin and thine, and the vw of valve ; and, 
finally, the compound consonants ch (in church) and j (Gin 
judge). Some of these needs we have managed to provide 
for: we have turned the two forms of the Latin 7, I and J, 
into two separate letters, with very different values; we have 
done the same thing with the two forms of uw, V and U, con- 
verting the former into a sign for the sonant labial spirant ; 
by doubling the same character, we have made_one wholly 
new letter, w, for the labial semi-vowel ; and we have utilized 
y and z, as semi-vowel and sonant sibilant. We have also 
brought & back into its old place—yet without perceptible 
gain, since its introduction makes ¢ superfluous; 4, ¢, and s 
having but two sounds to designate among them. The new 
characters which the Anglo-Saxons had devised for expressing 
the two ¢h-sounds we have unfortunately suffered to go out 
of use again. And g and ware still as useless te us as they 
were of old to the Romans. Hence, we have virtually only 


XII. ] ENGLISH ORTHOGRAPHY. 467 


twenty-three letters wherewith to write at least thirty-two 
sounds. In the process of phonetic change, whose tendency 
is always toward the increase of the spoken alphabet, the fill- 
ing up of the system of articulated sounds by the distinction 
of slighter and more nicely differentiated shades of articula- 
tion, our spoken alphabet has very notably outgrown the 
limits of our written alphabet. 

To this cause are to be attributed, in part, the anomalies of 
our orthography. But only in the lesser part. If an alphabet 
is hardly able to enlarge itself to the dimensions of a growing 
body of sounds, it is because men do not easily learn to write 
their words otherwise than as they have been accustomed to 
do, even when they have learned to pronounce them otherwise 
—-and the same cause operates in other ways yet more effect- 
ually to bring about a discordance between the spoken and 
the written language. It has been the misfortune of the 
English to pass, during its written period, through the most 
important crisis in its history, its mixture with the Norman 
French, also a written tongue: not only were the discordant 
orthographic usages of the two thus forced together within 
the limits of the same language, but a period of both orthoépic 
and orthographic confusion was introduced—and the ortho- 
graphic confusion has been, in great measure, only stereo- 
typed, not remedied, by the usage of later times. 

We of the present age have thus been in a measure de- 
_prived, not by our own fault, of the advantages belonging to a 
phonetic mode of writing—advantages which seemed to have 
been secured to us by the joint labours of so many races and 
so many generations. And yet, we are not altogether without 
fault in the matter, for we are consenting unto the deeds of 
our fathers and predecessors. As a community, we are not 
content with accepting as inevitable our orthographical in- 
heritance, and resolving to make the best of it, despite its 
defects; we even defend it as being better than any other; 
we strive to persuade ourselves that an etymological or a his- 
torical mode of spelling, as we phrase it, is inherently prefer- 
able to a phonetic. Now it is altogether natural and praise- 
worthy that we should be strongly attached to a time-honoured 


institution, in the possession of which we have grown up, 
20 * 


468 AKOMALIES OF if LECT. 


and which we have learned to look upon as a part of the sub- 
sisting fabric of our speech; it is natural that we should love 
even its abuses, and should feel the present inconvenience to 
ourselves of abandoning it niuch more keenly than any po- 
spective advantage which may result to us or our successors 
from such action; that we should therefore look with jealousy 
upon any one who attempts to change it, questioning nar- 
rowly his right to set himself up as its reformer, and the 
merits of the reforms he proposes. But this natural and 
laudable feeling becomes a mere blind prejudice, and justly 
open to ridicule, when it puts on airs, proclaims itself the de- 
fender of a great principle, regards inherited modes of spelling 
as sacred, and frowns upon the phonetist as one who would 
fain mar the essential beauty and value of the language. Of 
all the forms of linguistic conservatism, or purism, orthographic 
purism is the lowest and the easiest; for it deals with the 
mere external shell or dress of language, and many a one can 
make stout fight in behalf of the right spelling of a word 
whose opinion as to its pronunciation even, and yet more its 
meaning and nice application, would possess no authority or 
value whatever: hence it is also the commonest, the least 
reasonable, and the most bigoted. When it claims to be as- 
serting a principle, it is only defending by casuistry a preju- 
dice; it determines beforehand to spell in the prevailing mode, 
and then casts about to see what reasons besides the mode it 
can find for doing so, in each particular case. It overwhelms 
with misapplied etymologic learning him who presumes to 
write honor and favor for honour and favour (as if it were 
highly desirable to retain some reminiscence of the French 
forms, honneur and faveur, through which we have derived 
them from the Latin honor and favor), and then insists just as 
strongly upon neighbour (which is neither French nor Latin), 
it is not more concerned to preserve the J of calm (Latin 
ealmus) than that of could (Anglo-Saxon eudhe: the J has 
blundered in, from fancied analogy with would and should), 
the g of sovereign (Old-English soveraine, French souverain, 
Italian sovrano) than that of reign (Latin regnum), the s of 
tsland (Anglo-Saxon, ealand) than that of isle (Old-French 
tele, Latin insula) ; it upholds such anomalies as women, which 


x11. ENGLISH ORTHOGRAPHY. 469 


offends equally against the phonetic and the etymological 
principle Gt comes from Anglo-Saxon wif-men). How much 
better were it to confess candidly that we cling to our modes 
of spelling, and are determined to perpetuate them, simply 
because they are ours, and we are used to and love them, with 
ail their absurdities, rather than try to make them out in- 
herently desirable! Even if the irregularities of English 
orthography were of historical origin throughout—as, in fact, 
they are so only in part—it is not the business of writing to 
teach or suggest etymologies. We have already noted it as 
one of the distinguishing excellencies of the Indo-European 
languages, that they are so ready to forget the derivation of a 
term in favour of the convenience of its practical use: he, 
then, is ready to abnegate a hereditary advantage of his mode 
of speech, who, for the sake of occasional gratification to a 
few curious heads, would rivet for ever upon the millions of 
writers and readers of English the burden of such an ortho- 
graphy. The real etymologist, the historic student of lan- 
guage, is wholly independent of any such paltry assistance, 
and would rejoice above measure to barter every “historical ” 
item in our spelling during the last three hundred years for a 
sirict phonetic picture of the language as spoken at that dis- 
tance in the past. Nor do we gain a straw’s weight of ad- 
vantage in the occasional distinction to the eye of words which 
are of different signification, though pronounced alike: our 
language is not so Chinese in its character as to require aid 
of this sort; our writing needs not to guard against am- 
biguities which are never felt in our spoken speech; we should 
no more miss the graphic distinction of meet, meat, and mete, 
of right, write, and rite, than we do now that of the two 
cleave's and page’s, the three or four found’s and sound’s, or 
the other groups of homonyms of the same class. 

It may well be the case that a thorough reform of English 
orthography will be found for ever impracticable; it certainly 
will be so, while the public temper remains what it now is, 
But let us at any rate acknowledge the truth, that a reforma- 
tion is greatly to be desired, and perhaps, at some time in the 
future, a way will be found to bring it about. If we expect 
and wish that our tongue become one day a world-language, 


470 DESTINY AND CHARACTER OF [ LECT, 


understood and employed on every continent and in every- 
clime, then it is our bounden duty to help prepare the way 
for taking off its neck this heavy mullstone. How heavy, 
we are hardly able to realize, having ourselves well-nigh or 
quite forgotten the toil it once cost us to learn to read and 
speak correctly ; yet we cannot help seeing how serious an 
obstacle to the wide extension of a language is a mode of 
writing which converts it, from one of the easiest in the 
world, into one of the hardest, for a foreigner to acquire and 
use. 

The English is already, perhaps, spoken and written as 
mother-tongue by a greater number of persons than any other 
existing dialect of high cultivation; and its sphere seems 
to be widening, at home and abroad, more rapidly than that 
of any other. If it ever becomes a world-language, it will 
do so, of course, not on account of its superiority as a form 
of human speech—since no one ever yet abandoned his own 
vernacular and adopted another because the latter was a 
better language—but by the effect of social and political con- 
ditions, which shall widen the boundaries of the English- 
speaking community. Yet we cannot but be desirous to 
convince ourselves that 1t is worthy of so high a destiny. 
To trust our own prepossessions upon this point may be very 
easy and comfortable, but is not quite safe. The universal 
tendency among men to exaggerate the advantages of their 
own mode of speech and depreciate those of others would 
make us, in spite of our sincere attempts at impartiality, 
more than just to our beloved mother-tongue—even though 
we might be willing to allow that, as all advantages cannot 
be found united in one individual, each of its rivals among 
the cultivated dialects of the present or of the past may sur- 
pass it in one or another respect. It does not he in our 
way to take up the matter seriously, inquiring and deter- 
mining what is the absolute rank of the English among lan- 
guages; yet it may be worth while to give a few moments’ 
consideration to one or two points that bear upon the 
question. 

We have, in the first place, already had occasion to notice 
that a language és just what the people to whoin it belongs 


x11. ] THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 471 


have made it by their use; it is the reflection of their minds, 
and of their minds’ contents; its words and phrases are in- 
stinct with all the depth, the nobility, the subtilty, and the 
beauty that belongs to their thought; it ean be made to ex- 
press at least as much, and as well, as it has been made to 
express. A literature, then, is one grand test of the worth 
of a language—and it is one by which we need not fear to see 
tried that of our own. It is not national prejudice that 
makes us claim for English literature, in respect to variety 
and excellence, a rank second to none. We can show, in 
every or nearly every department, men whv have made our 
English tongue say what no other tongue has exceeded. 

This is not, however, the only test. We cannot but ask 
also how our language is fitted to admit and facilitate that 
indefinite progress and extension of thought and knowledge 
to which we look forward as the promise of the future. Has 
it all the capacity of development which could be desired for 
it? In their bearing upon this inquiry, two of its striking 
peculiarities—the two most conspicuous, in the view of the 
historical student of language—call for special notice: 
namely, its uninflective or formless character, and its com- 
position out of two somewhat heterogeneous elements, Ger- 
manic and Romanice. 

Both these peculiarities have been made the subject of re- 
peated reference in our discussions hitherto. For its poverty 
in formative elements, for its tendency to monosyilabism, for 
its inclusion of many parts of speech in the same unvaried 
word, we have compared English more than once. with 
Chinese. But we must beware of misapprehending the 
scope and reach of the comparison. There is a curious and 
suggestive analogy between the present geographical position 
of the English and Chinese races and the present character 
of their languages. Since our occupation of the whole 
breadth of the American continent, the speakers of these two 
tongues look over to one another as nearest neighbours 
across the intervening Pacific. But the situation of the 
Chinese people is the result of simple quiescence in their 
primeval abode; while the English, setting forth probably 
from the depths of the same Orient, have reached the seata 


472 CHARACTER OF (LECT 


they how occupy, in the sequel of an adventurous and con. 
quering career which has led them around nearly the whole 
earth, and leaves them masters of many of its fairest portions, 
under the most varied skies. The virtual distance between 
the two is therefore almost world-wide; it is to be measured 
by the course which the English race has traversed, rather 
than by the distance which still separates its outposts from 
China. So the English language, starting in that mono- 
syllabism which the Chinese has never quitted, has made the 
whole round of possible development, till its most advanced 
portions have almost come back again to their original state ; 
but it still holds in possession much of the territory over 
which it has passed, and is dowered with all the wealth 
which it has gathered on its way; it has passed through all 
stages and varieties of enrichment, and has kept fast hold of 
their most valuable products. It is therefore in its essential 
character as far removed from the Chinese as is the Greek. 
Its resources for the expression of relations, for the sufficient 
distinction of the categories of thought, are hardly inferior 
to those of the tongues of highest inflective character: they 
are of another kind, it is true, but one which, if it has its 
disadvantages, has its advantages as well. Our analytic 
flection has a practical value equivalent to that even of the 
rich synthesis of the classical tongues; and in this respect 
also we need confess to no disabling inferiority, as compared 
with the speakers of other cultivated languages. 

That, again, the English is-a mixed tongue, may not be 
denied. There has not been that assimilation of its two 
elements which is the natural result of a complete fusion. 
The length of our words of Latin origin, as compared with the 
Saxon, is a plain external indication of this: take anywhere 
a page of English, and you will find that its Saxon words 
average less than half as long as those of other derivation. 
What would have been the natural tendency of the language 
with respect to these long forms is shown by its treatment 
of words borrowed earlier from the classical tongues: thus, 
it has worked down moneta into mint, kiiriake into church, 
presbuteros into priest, eleémostiné into alms, and so on. Only 
the specially conservative forces of learned culture and the 


Zit. | THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 473 


habit of writing have saved many others of our sesquiped- 
alian Latin elements from a like fate. We have, then, in a 
certain sense, two languages combined: one of root-words, 
prevailingly monosyllabic; the other of long derived forms, 
whose roots and derivation are in the main unrecognizable 
by the mass of speakers: and the latter must often lack some- 
thing of that freshness and direct force which belong to the 
former. But, on the one hand, we have seen above (toward 
the end of the third lecture) that the etymological connec- 
tions of a word are, after all, of very subordinate consequence 
in determining its degree of significant force and suggestive- 
ness; and, on the other hand, there has been, to no small ex- 
tent, a real amalgamation of our two vocabularies, the Ger- 
manic and Romanic: among the words, mainly Saxon, which 
answer the commonest and simplest uses of communication, 
there are not afew also of Latin origin; and some Latin 
suffixes are familiarly added to Saxon themes, as well as the 
contrary. Our Latin words thus range from the extreme of 
homeliness and familiarity to the extreme of learned stateli- 
ness, and furnish the means of attaining a great diversity of 
styles. At the same time, the partial Romanization of our 
language throughout its whole structure renders it possible 
for us to naturalize more thoroughly, and use more adroitly, 
the words which, in common with all other tongues of en- 
lightened nations at the present day, we are obliged to import 
in great numbers for the designation of objects and rela- 
tions of learned knowledge. Richness of synonymy, variety 
of style, and power of assimilation of new learned material, 
are, then, our compensation for whatever of weakness may 
cling to our language by reason of the discordanve of its 
constituent elements. 

Our general conclusion must be that, if the English is not 
entitled to all the exaggerated encomiums which are some- 
times heaped upon it, if it has no right to be set at the 
head of all languages, living or extinct, it is at least worthy 
of all our Move and admiration, and will not be found un- 
equal to anything which the future shall require of it—even 
should circumstances make it the leading tongue of civilized 
humanity. For what it is to become, every individual who em- 


4.7 4, CONCLUSION. 


ploys it shares in the responsibility. The character of a 
language is not determined by the rules of grammarians and 
lexicographers, but by the usage of the community, by the 
voice and opinion of speakers and hearers; and this works 
most naturally and effectively when it works most unconsci- 
ously. Clear and manly thought, and direct and unaffected 
expression, every writer and speaker can aim at; and, by so 
doing, can perform his part in the perfecting of his mother- 
tongue. 


With these few words respecting our own language, which 
must be the subject of highest interest with every student 
of language to whom it is native, I bring to a close our con- 
sideration of the subject of these lectures, thanking you for 
your kind and patient attention to my exposition of it, and 
hoping that what I have said may not be without effect in 
helping you to clear apprehensions of the nature and history 
of one of man’s noblest gifts and most valuable acquisitions 


ANALYSIS. 


—-_oe— 


LECTURE I. 


i. Recenr date of linguistic science; its preparatory stages; reasons of theiy 
failure; modern conditions favoring its development. 

2. Establishment of the Indo-European family of languages; of the comparative 
method of linguistic study; aid afforded by the Sanskrit. 

3. Birthplace of the science ; scholars and works mainly instrumental in its 
progress; its claim to the title of science. 

4. Field and scope of the science; its relation to other modes of the study of 
language; its aims. 

5. Interest of the scientific study of language; importance of speech to man; 
value of its study to ethnology and history. 

6. What is undertaken in these lectures; sketch of their argument; method to 
be followed. 

7. Comprehensive inquiry of the linguistic student; first form in which it is put. 

8. The English language learned by its speakers; early steps of the process; 
illustrations ; distinctions, classifications, and positive knowledge acquired 
along with words. 

9. Passive attitude of the learner; disregard of etymologies; relation of the ac- 
quired sign to the idea it represents. 

10. Our mother-tongue not acquired by inheritance; illustrations. 

11. Advantage involved in learning language, rather than making it. 

12. What kind of English we thus learn; local peculiarities of speech; their per- 
sistency; influences correcting them. 

13. How much of English we learn; the child’s vocabulary; extent of the whole 
English tongue; the part of it acquired by different classes; the part left un- 
acquired; differences of individuals as regards power and style of expression. 

14. Differences of individuals as regards the meanings attached to words; errors 
of acquisition and application; imperfection of language as representative of 
thought; variation of meaning, in different classes of words; verbal disputes. 

15. Respects in which each one’s English differs from that of other3, what the 
English language is; what gives it unity. 


476 ANALYSIS. 

16. How the language is kept in existence; aid rendered by literature, the part 
used and transmitted by individual speakers and writers. 

17. Alteration of the language in the process of transmission; difference of our 
English from Shakespeare's; from Chaucer's; from Anglo-Saxon; the change 
unintended by those who made it. 

18. Change in vocabulary; its reasons; its different rate in different parts of the 
vocabulary; examples; its necessity; it consists in losses as well as additions, 

19. Change in the form. of words; imperfection of traditional transmission 37f 
language, in children and in older persons; currency of bad English. 

2). Tendencies leading to this kind of change; examples: silent letters; al- 
tered accent; new verbal forms; new words; altered grammatical value, ete. - 

21. Present persistency of English; its former rapid mutation; historical causes. 

22. Universal value of the main results of these inquiries; what every lan- 
guage is, how acquired, how kept in life, how changed; what is a living 
language; change the fundamental fact in all language. 


LECTURE II. 


1. Review: principal topics of the preceding lecture. 

2. In what way language exists; how it is maintained or modified. 

3. False views upon this subject; incidents adduced in their support. 

4. Futility of the argument from these incidents; how and why a potentate, 
or other individual, cannot make language; how he can do so; examples 
of words thus made or altered. 

5. What confers authority to make language, and under what restrictions; ex- 
amples from technical vocabularies ; change in the general language; usage 
the rule of speech. 

6. Examples of conscious discussions of the proprieties of speech; considerations 
determining the decision. 

7. Changes of form and structure, how brought about; examples. 

8. Influences and conditions favoring, or opposing, the: change of language; 
action upon it of individuals, and of the community; aim of the individual. 
9. Analogy between language and an organism; between its life and that of the 

animal kingdom; between linguistic science and geology. 

10. Abuse of these analogies; what language is, and how produced and changed. 

11. The study of language a historical science; its relation to other sciences, its 
fundamental difference from the physical sciences. 

12. Unartificial character of the facts and aspects of language studied by us; 
their objective value; real foundation of the analogies with physical science* 
other motives of the claim that linguistics is a physical science; their ground- 
lessness; true szientific character of the study. 

13. Return to the fundamental inquiry of linguistic science; new form in which 
it is put; historical investigation of a historical product. 

14. Etymology the foundation of the science; its processes to be illustrated. 

15. Analysis of words into their component parts; ordinary compounds; theit 
value; unity and independence given them. 

16. Closer compounds witb origin obscured; with origin effaced. 


ANALYSIS. AT7 


17. Compounds with subordmated element; examples of subordinated elements, 
or suffixes: -ful; -less; -ly, its history; -ship ; -d of the preterit, its history. 

18. Inferences as to the growth of words; their soundness. 

19. Further examples: -ple ; am and is. 

20. Genesis of suffixes, or formative elements, in general. 

21. Accumulation of suffixes about one root; universality of formative ele- 
ments in our language. 

22. Importance of the analytic process in etymology; its value as the retraciug 
of a previous synthesis; how far this is a matter of proof, and how far of infer- 
ence; reason why it is so; certainty of the inference 


LECTURE III, 


1. REVIEW: results of our inquiries hitherto. 

2. Universality of corrupting change in language; principal tendency underlying 
it; economy of effort in utterance. 

3. The sphere of corruption widened by composition of elements; examples. 

4. Reason of the alterability of words; oblivion of etymology in favor of con- 
venient use. 

5. Examples of forgotten etymologies with form unchanged; with form some- 
what changed. 

6. Valuable action of phonetic change in making formative elements and pro- 
ducing grammatical forms. 

7. Destructive effect of the same tendency; its alteration of linguistic structure. 

8. Mutilation and final loss of verbal endings, in Latin, Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, 
English. 

9. Effacement of declensional forms; what is left of them in English. 

10. Gender: its aspect in the older languages; its abandonment in English. 

11. Substitution of one mode of formal distinction for another; English irregular 
plurals; their origin. 

12. Irregular verbal conjugation in English: its origin, development, and pres- 
ent aspect. 

13. Origin of the later, or regular, conjugation of English verbs; its extension 
to irregular verbs. 

14. Extension to their present prevalence of our possessive and plural endings. 

15. Extensible character of formative elements; mobilization of new words by 
their means; historical mixtures thus produced. 

16. Loss, by phonetic corruption, of valuable distinctions; examples in verbal 
conjugation. 

17. Loss of distinctions of meaning; shall and will; obsolescence of subjunctive 

18. Change of form by conversion of one articulated sound into another. 

19. Agencies instrumental in producing articulate sounds; example of thei 
action, friendly; its elements; accent; distinction of syllables. 

30. Compatibility of articulate sounds with one another; degrees of pronounce- 
ableness, in the same or in different languages; wherein euphony consists. 

21. Physical scheme of English spoken alphabet; its series and classes; distine- 
tion of vowel and consonant; of sonant and surd articulations. 

22. Ordinary conversions of one sound into another: exchange of surd anc 


478 ANALYSIS. 


sonant; of sounds of the same series; of sounds of the same class; irregular 
conversions; assimilation. 

23. Variability of vowel-sounds; resulting irregularity of English orthography. 

24 Relation of the student of language to phonetic changes; their efficient 
causes out of his reach; peculiar usages of different languages; ascribable te 
no other causes than habit and caprice of speakers. 

25. Grimm’s law of consonantal mutation in Germanic Janguage; the phen me- 
non unexplained; partial analogies for it. 

20. Loss of words out of language; its causes; where it most occurs; disap- 
pearance of ancient English vocabulary. 

27. Processes of change hitherto treated external; processes of internal change; 
interest of the latter; relation of the two kinds; necessity and universality of 
internal change. 

28. On what the possibility of internal change depends; examples of internal 
and external change. 

29. Illustrations of the processes of names-giving: moon, lune, sun; their deri- 
vation. extension, and various application. 

30. Further examples: smith and Smith ; Caesar. 

31. The two fundamental methods of names-giving; their varieties. 

32. Variety of meanings of the same word; examples, board, post, head, court, 
examples of notable divergence of meaning: become, kind and like, second. 

33. Ambiguity of words; in what consists clearness of expression; never fully 
attainable. 

34. Different words with kindred meaning; Synonyms; their insufficiency. 

35. Variation of form accompanying variation of meaning; examples. 

36. Development of intellectual and abstract from physical and concrete meane 
ing; examples, from Latin and Germanic parts of our vocabulary. 

37. Attenuation of meaning; production of relational words, connectives, sub- 
stantive verb, etc. 

88. Phrases; change of meaning in them; in combinations. 

39. Change of meaning in formative elements; reduction of independent words 
to the value of such elements; verbal auxiliaries: do; have, its variety of use; 
signs of infinitive and possessive; prevalence of this class of words in some 
modern languages. 

40. Variety of meanings in the derivatives of one root; fertility and variety of 
the resources of expression. 

41. Degrees of reflectiveness in the processes of names-giving; devising of a ter- 
minology; the most essential part of language-making unconscious; develop- 
ment of expression; internal enrichment of a vocabulary; its correspondence 
with the knowledge and capacity of its users; power of individuals over it. 

42. Form-making always unreflective and gradual. 

43, Every act of language-making the work of speakers; antecedency of tha 
conception to its expression; what is meant by this; example. 
44. Every name as a historical reason, founded in convenience; Gerivation; 

what etymology undertakes; example. 

45. The etymological reason neither necessary nor permanent; tsage the s¢cie 
authority for a name. 


ANALYSIS. 479 


46. Why we study the history of words; how they illustrate human history 
examples of words and their historical reasons. 

47. Intrusion of etymological reminiscences a detriment to the practical use 
of language; their oblivion essential to its development; their oo ‘asional 
rhetorical value. 

48. Use, not etymology, makes the significance of a word; our comprehensicn 
ind»pendert of etymological aid; relation of speech to thought. 


LECTURE IV. 


1. Review of the ground passed over: processes of external and internal 
growth of language. 

2. Variations in the rate of linguistic change, in difterent tongues and times. 

3. Influence of external circumstances on rate of change; imaginary illustrative 
cases; correspondence of the language and mental furniture of a people. 

4. Differences in the kind of linguistic change; change of vocabulary; possible 
effect on structure. 

5. Change at present in English; call for it; infusion of new knowledge into old 
words; adaptation of familiar expressions to new and more precise uses. 

§. Growth of English by combination and derivation; its restricted sphere; mo- 
bilization of words; its apparatus hardly admits of increase. 

7. Importation of classical material into English; circumstances favoring it; 
learned character of the new knowledge; convenience and general use of this 
mode of word-making; its prominence in our use; pedantically learned English. 

8. Historical causes changing the mode of growth in English; nature of the 
obstacle to internal development. 

9. Influences checking the structural decay of language; reflective use; litera- 
ture and education. ; 

10. Effect of conservative influences when limited to a class; divergence of @ 
learned and a popular dialect; dead languages; conservatism and purism. 

11. Prospects of modern cultivated dialects; tendency of English in America. 

12. Remaining difficulties of the problem; peculiarities of national character}; 
appeal to physical and physiological causes vain; in what wavy alone physical 
causes can become operative; their mode of action as yet undetermined. 

13. Dialectic differences; what a process of linguistic growth is; mutual action 
of individuals and communities the foundation of dialectic history. 

14. Diversifying tendencies in linguistic growth; their origin, the diverse action 
of individuals. € 

15. Unifying influence of communication; object of speech; necessity of mutua. 
anderstanding the restraint upon indefinite alteration. 

18. Unity of speech necessary in a community; what this implies; variable 
meaning of community; parts of language belonging to communities within 
communities; anthority for change in each. 

17. Causes which favor diversification of language; their external character, 
want of culture. 

18. Influences preserving unity of speech; culture; literature. 

19. Production of unity of speech out of diversity; examples; English provincial 


480 ANALYSIS. 


ism; colonies; immigrants into America; effacement and productior of dia 
lects alike universal. 

20. History of the German language: its ancient dialects; their various change; 
their condition in more recent times; early High-German cultivated dialects, 
uprise of the present one; influence of the Reformation, printing, Luther's 
writings; its increasing power; its possible future: limits to its extension. 

21 Similar history of other cultivated dialects: French; Provencal; Italian. 

£2. History of the Latin: its original seat; its kindred and neighbors; its spread; 
upon what dependent; speech of Romanized Italy; further extension, through 
southern Europe; resulting group of Romanic tongues. 

23. Popular speech of the empire; fate of the classical Latin; development of va- 
tying dialects; local disturbing causes; new national and cultivated tongues. 
24. Naturalness of the convergence and divergence of dialects; results of the 
fusion of communities; the Latin, the Frankish, the Norse, in Gaul; the Sax- 

on, the Norman, in England; their fusion, and its result. 

25. Dialects in England; their effacement in the transfer to America; assimila- 
tion to the cultivated dialect; uniformity of English speech in America; in- 
fluences contributing to it. 

26. Agreement of the English of Britain and of America; its imperfection; dan- 
gers threatening it, and influences to be relied on to maintain it. 

27. Dialects in America; their range and degree; difference of colloquial and 
literary language. 

28. The terms dialect and language interchangeable; transmutation of species 
in linguistic history. 


LECTURE V. 


1. REvIEw of the topics treated sn the preceding lecture. 

2. Error of regarding dialects as the progenitors, rather than descendants, of uni- 
form speech. 

3. In what the differences of related dialects consist; production of these differ- 
ences by varying linguistic change; examples, verity, attend, true, father, is. 

4. General inference from such facts; fallacy of the opposing view; causes of the 
greater uniformity of human language in modern times. 

5. Dialectic variation found within the limits of every language; differences of 
its descendants not the product of this, but additions to it. 

6. Cultivation of a language; what it effects, and how; economy in speech; 
what a cultivated languae is. 

7 Dialectic differences and their causes of one and the same kind through all 
singuistic history; necessary inference from linguistic correspondences; allow- 
ance for accidental resemblances and borrowing. 

8. Classification of languages by their relationship; next task to be undertaken 

§. Relationship of English; unity of its dialects; its connection with languages 
of Germany ; historical explanation of this. 

1€. The three divisions of Germanic language; their inferred origin and descent. 

14. Connection cf part of our vocabulary with the Romanic languages; its his 
{orical ground. 


ANALYSIS. 48{ 


12. Connection of Germanic and Romanic languages with one another and with 
other languages; why to be expected. 

13. Other European tongues related to ours; Greek; Celtic, its former extent and 
nresent represertatives; Slavonic, its domain and chief branches; Lithuanic. 

14 Furopean languages of other kindred. 

15. Asiatic tongues related to ours: Iranian; Indian. 

14 Family of languages thus made up; its names; relations of its members. 

17. Evidence of the unity of the famiiy; most conveniently exhibitable in certain 
classes of words; why this is so; illustrations. 

18. Kxamples of correspondences of Indo-European words: numerals, pronouns, 
words of relationship. 

19. Value of these correspondences; they cannot be the result of accident or of 
borrowing; theory sometimes put forward to explain them; its untenability ; 
mixture of languages very slow to affect such words as those selected; slowest 
of all to affect grammatical structure. 

20. Correspondences of grammatical structure in Indo- European speech; per- 
sonal endings of verbs. 

21. The correspondences given specimens merel 3 only possible way of account- 
ing for them. 

22. Craneet home of the language unknown; even the latest movements of the 
Indo-European races quite obscure; their several appearance in history. 

23. Linguistic evidence as to the home wanting; futility of inference from supe- 
rior primitiveness of ceriain languages; inter-connectious of the tranches still 
doubtful; conflicting views respecting them; the general! question insoluble. 

24. Time of Indo-European unity undeterminable; Jatest admissible date; 
recent discoveries bearing upon the antiquity of man. 

25. Partial restoration of the original common vocabulary; legitimacy of infer- 
ences {rom it as to condition of its speakers. 

26. Inferences so derived: mode of life, possessions, arts, social ‘constitution, and 
religion of the Indo-European mother-trive. 


LECTURE VI. 

1. REVIEW: survey of the branches of Indo-European language ; our next task a 
more detailed survey. 

2. Divisions of Germanic branch; Low-German group; English and its direct 
ancestors; Frisian; Old Saxon; their fate; Netherlandish; Flemish. 

8. High-German group; its three periods; their date, ruling dialects, and litera- 
tures. 

4. Scandinavian group; Icelandic records; their date and importance; modern 
Scandinavian dialects. 

5. Extinct groups; Ulfilas’s Bible-version; Mceso-Gothic; its importance. 

6. Slavonic branch; Church Slavic; Russian; other dialects of the south-eastern 
greup: principal languages of the western group. 

7. Lithuanic group; its relation to Slavonic; source of its interest; its dialects. 

8. Celtic branch; its present narrow dimensions; its decay and probable extine« 
tion Celromania 


dl 


4.82, ANALYSIS. 


9. Earliest Celtic records; their date and character; other Gadhelic dialects; 
Cymric dialects; Welsh literature; Cornish; Armorican. 

10. Romanic branch; its members; date of their early records. 

11. Romanic tongues representatives of the Latin; age of the Latin; other related 
dialects of ancient Italy; Italic group; false theories as to origin of Latin. 

12. Greek; its earliest monuments; its dialects, their date and early records; 
modern Greek. 

13. Iranian branch; cuneiform inscriptions; the Avesta and its language; Pehlevi 
Parsi; modern Persian language and literature; character of modern Persian. 

id. Languages allied to Iranian; Armenian, ete. 

15. Indian branch; part of India occupied by it; modern Indo-European dialects 
of India; Gypsy language; Prakrit and Pali; their relation to the Sanskrit. 
16. Present position of the Sanskrit; its two dialects; character of the classical 
Sanskrit; its literature and chronology; Vedic dialect; date of the Veda; its 

value to the study of Indo-European antiquity. 

17. Character of the Sanskrit; unfounded claims in its favor; its defects and 
advantages; source and degree of its value to Indo-European philology. 

18. Sources of the interest attaching to the study of Indo-European language; its 
relation to ourselves; historical importance of the race speaking it. 

19. Entrance of the Indo-European race into history; rise to importance of the 
several branches, Persian, Greek, Roman, Germanic; Semitic interference; 
present. position of the race. 

20. Legitimacy of the historical title to interest; intrinsic superiority of Indo- 
European speech. 

21. Connection of Indo-European philology with the science of language; its 
grounds; antiquity and variety of Indo-European dialects, as compared with 
Chinese, Egyptian, Hebrew; with other tongues. _ 

22. Advantage to the student in possessing connected dialects of varied structure 
and different age; what he can do withvut them; with variety only of con- 
temporary dialects; illustrations; superior advantage offered in Indo-European 
language; the latter the basis of linguistic science; but not its whole material. 

23. End sought by the linguistic student; material and method of his search; 
historical character of his investigations; qualities needed in the etymologist. 

24. Difficulties of etymological study; waste of mind in its false pursuit. 

25. The comparative method; its grounds; comparative philology. 

26. Abuses of the comparative method; miscellaneous comparison; comparison 
of distantly related tongues without regard to intermediate forms; examples; 
comparison of languages unrelated. 

27. Cumulative nature of evidences of relationship in language: process of its 
establishment. 

28. lifference of modern etymologizing from ancient; qualities demanded vy 
it; its two fundamental principles. 

29. Comparison of lists of words; its insufficiency as means of linguistic : esearch. 

30. Limitation of linguistic study to a comparison of words; its error; what is 
involved in the history of a word; example. 

31. Unlimited scope of the comparative method. 


ANALYSIS. 483 


LECTURE VII. 


1. REviEw: importance of Indo-European language, and method of its inv esti: 
gation; next subject of inquiry. 

2. Degree of our knowledge of the history of Indo-European speech. 

3, Processes of linguistic growth; their possible future etfect; question as to their 
beginning; reply to it. 

4. Ground of our knowledge concerning beginnings of speech; examples cf receuit 
English combinations; infereace as to all formative elements; authity ef 
analogical evidence in language. 

5. Analysis of trrevocability ; its nucleus; original independence of the latter. 

6. Primary and secondary suffixes; how far they differ and agree. 

7. Indo-European roots; their value; original monosyllabism of Indo-European 
speech. 

8. Prima facie objections to this view; humbleness of such beginnings; their 
insufficiency. 

9. The two classes of roots; pronominal roots; their office, application, derivative 
classes, number, structure; exainples. 

10. Verbal roots; their number, structure, and office; examples; nature of thvir 
significance. 

11. The theory of roots as the beginnings of language, whence derived; contro- 
versy as to first words; as to relation of the two classes of roots. 

12. Question as to absolute originality of recognized roots; examples of apparent 
English roots, really derivative; of Indo-European roots of the same character; 
caution necessary on this head. 

18. Original roots analogous, at least, with those we trace; value of all forms of 
more than one syllable; other supporting considerations: earliest inflections; 
difference of a primitive and a derived monosyllabism; scanty alphabet of 
first Indo-European language; its development. 

14. First forms, how made; first verbal tense; genesis of its endings; their relica 
in English. i 

15. Other tenses; the augment; reduplication; traces of the latter in Germanic. 

16. Moods; future tense; reflexives and passives; derivative conjugations; 
special theme of present and imperfect. 

17. Reductions and extensions of verbal inflection, in Greek, Latin, Germanic. 

18. Genesis of nouns and noun-forms: nouns without suftix of derivation; most 
immediate derivatives from roots; suffixes of derivation; their origin. 

19. Endings of declension; relations indicated by them: case — Indo-European 
cases and their signs; number; gender — character and origin of grammatical 
gender. 

20. Reduction of declensional system in modern languages, as to number, case, 
and gender. 

21. Declension of adjectives and pronouns; relation of substantive and adjective 

#2 Other parts of speech: adverbs, their derivation; prepositions, their primitive 
\aue and origin; conjunctions; articles; interjections. 

%3. Development of Indo-European language; its early date: its slow and grad 


484 ANALYSIS- 


ual progress, reasons of this; rate acceleratedly rapid, up to a maximum in 
pre-historic time. 

24. Ubjection, hence drawn, to theory of primitive monosy!labism; progress of 
modern tongues toward an analytic structure. 

95. Weakness of the objection; joint action of synthetic and analytic tendencies 
the latter not always the stronger in historic times; illustrations; character 01 
Russian. 

26. True form of the question involved; modern analytic forms do not disprove 
growth of older synthetic; habit determines the preponderance of either tend- 
ency; reasons for the climax of synthetic habit; for the later prevalence ot 
analytic; general conclusion. 

97. Renan’s doctrine of the antecedency of synthesis; his confusion of synthetic 
conception with synthetic style of expression, which as really implies menta. 
analysis as does analytic expression. 

98. Steady progress of linguistic growth, without sudden shift or break ;- base- 
lessness of the theory that language-making and history exclude and succeed 
one another: necessity of rigorous method in reasoning from known conditions 
of language back to unknown. 


LECTURE VIII. 


1. Review, next subject; its connection with what precedes. 

9. Wider value of results drawn from history of Indo-European speech; things 
true of all language. 

3. Linguistic families, on what evidence established; their uncertain boundaries; 
doubtful languayes. 

4. Abnormal effacement of material signs of relationship; introduction of evi- 
dence derived from structure; its possible value. 

5. Structural characteristics of Indo-European language; its combinations; their 
closeness;. its iaflective character; wherein this consists. 

6. Semitic family; its localiy; other names for it; its chief members. 

7. Semitic history: Phenicians and their activity; Semitic empires in Mesopo- 
tamia; their records; importance of Hebrew history; rise and fall of Arab 
greatness. 

§. Branches of Semitic language and their literatures. Canaanitic branch; 
Hebrew, ancient, Rabbinic, and modern; Samaritan; Phenician remains; 
Cathaginian. 

9 Aramaic branch: Jewish Chaldee; Christian Syriac, ancient and modern; 
Nabatean. 

10 Arabic branch: Himyaritic remains; Ethiopian dialects; Arabic, earliest 

cords; spread of the Arabic; its infusion into other tongues. 

11. Characteristics of Semitic speech: its inflective type; what this implies; its 
triliteral roots and internal flection; illustration; affixes and derivation. 

12. Peculiarity of Semitic inflection; analogies for it in Indo-European language; 
th-ir fundamental difference; hints at a partial explanation of it; attempts te 
resolve the roots into monosyllables; difficulty of the problem. 


ANALYSIS. 485 


13. Semitic verb: its numbers, persons, tenses, moods, derivative conjugations; 
Semitic nouns their declension: substantive verb. 

14. Semitic syntax; development of meaning; general character of the language. 

15. Relations of the Semitic dialects; persistency of their structure; its reasons; 
disiculty of combination; comparative primitiveness of the dialects; character 
of modern dialects. 

16. Semitic dialect of Assyria; asserted connection of Semitic with certain lan 
guages of Africa; with Indo-European languages; its insufficient grounds. 

17. General value of Semitic language; erroneous opinions as to the Hebrew. 

18. Scythian family: its territory; other names for it; its brancnes. 

19. Ugrian branch: its position and divisions; Samoyedic branch. 

20. Turkish branch: historic career of the Turks; divisions of the branch; relae 
tion of their dialects. 

21. Mongolian branch: its conquests; its present condition and territory. 

22. Tungusic branch: its situation and divisions; the Manchus in China. 

23. Nature of Scythian activity; literatures of the Manchus and Mongols; of 
the Uigurs, and the Jagataic and Osmanli Turks; of Hungarians; of Finns. 

24. Asserted Ugrian dialect of Assyrian monuments. 

25. Uncertainty of the tie connecting the Scythian branches; possible explana- 
tions of their discordance; their correspondence morphological rather than 
material; their agglutinative type; meaning and value of this. 

26. Scythian structure: derivation by suffixes; invariable roots; harmonie 
sequence of vowels; regularity and complication of inflection. 

27. Scythian declension; conjugation, as illustrated from Turkish; imperfect 
distinction of nouns and verbs; syntactical construction. 

28. Differences of structure among the Scythian branches; their present classi- 
fication provisional. 


LECTURE IX. 


1. REvIEw: the families of language already treated. 

2. Partial uncertainty of genetic classification; our knowledge of some families 
imperfect; differences of investigators and their results. 

8. Doubt as to unity of the Scythian family; the so-called Turanian family ; its 
worthlessness; origin of the name. 

4. Dravidian group of languages; its territory ; its principal dialects; their situa- 
tion and culture; structure of Dravidian language; its relation to Scythian. 

5. Languages of north-eastern Asia: the Japanese; its structure, dialects, litera- 
ture, and writing; Corean; Kurilian; Kamchatkan; other languages of ex- 
treme north-east: their relation to problem of origin of American population. 

6. Monosyllabic languages; their grade and mode of structure; illustrations, 
Chinese and English; comparative phrases; relations of the monosyllabic 
tongues to one another; evidence of their unity. 

7. China: antiquity, persistency, and value, of Chinese culture; its decay; Con- 
fucius, his work; Chinese literature. 

8. Character of Chinese language; phonctic form, number, and office of ita . 
words; their written signs; grouping of its words; classifiers and signs of parts 
of speech, approach to agglutination; value of the Chinese. 


486 ANALYSIS. 


9. Languages of Farther India; their culture and character; languages of the 
Himalaya; Tibetan language and literature. 

10. Malay-Polynesian family: its extent; culture among its languages; the 
unity; their phonetic structure; roots; inflection of verb and noun. 

1i. Melanesian languages; tribes speaking them; their diversity; their struc- 
ture Languages of Australia. 

12 kgyptian language: antiquity of Egyptian culture; its monuments and ree- 
ords; their decipherment; Coptic; hieratic and demotic Egyptian. 

13. Other African languages, claimed to be akin with Egyptian; Hamitie family. 

14. Structure of Eyyptian language; poverty and ambiguity of its forms; gender; 
claimed relationship of Hamitic and Semitic languages. 

15. Languages of the rest of Africa; dificulty of their treatment; South-African 
family; its prefixes; inflection of nouns and verhs; clicks; their derivation. 
Languages of the middle of the continent. 

lb Languages of America: difficulties of the problem they present; American 
cuiture; jsolation of the dialects; variety of external conditions; peculiar 
changeableness ; modern date of our knowledge. 

17. Probable unity of American language; its polysynthetic structure; what is 
meant by this; traces of it elsewhere; other evidences of relationship. 

18. Discordance of material in American languages; principal groups in North 
America. 

19. Question of derivation of American aborigines; futility of attempting ite 
settlement at present ; what we have first to do; wild theories upon the sub- 
ject; claims upon us of the study of American language and archeology. 

20. Isolated languages: the Basque; its place, character, and possible value; 
Etruscan; its alleged relationship; Caucasian languages; Albanian; Yen- 
isean; other like cases possible. 


LECTURE X. 


1. REVIEW: synopsis of the families of language. 

2. Varying degrees of certainty of the genetic classification; morphological evi- 
dence; its value as compared with material. 

8. Morphological division of languages into two classes; constituents and charac- 
teristics of the classes; the division not absolute; one-sided. 

4 Morpbological division into three classes; their characteristics; their descrip- 
tion not exhaustive; the two higher classes not homogeneous; the inflectiv* 
principle; its value; polysynthetic class. 

b Parallel of the threefold division with political conditions; its weakness. 

6 Schleicher’s scheme of morphological notation; its application to monosyl!abie 
-anguages; to agyzlutinative; to inflective; its value. 

7. Variety of the characteristics to be taken account of in judging a language; 
structure not sufficient; significant content; difficulty of a classification by ab 
solute value. 

&. Fundamental and supericr importance of the genetic classification; its ecn 
nection with ethnology. 


ANALYSIS. 487 


%. Non-accordance of the linguistic and physical classifications of human races; 
their final reconciliation necessary; what can now be done toward it. 

1. Relation of language to race: erroneous views; their refutation; language 
not the certain sign of race, nor mixture of language the representation of mix- 
ture of races; caution thus imposed on the linguistic ethnologist. 

{1 Language a generally trustworthy indica ion of race; mixture of races the 
disturbing force in all ethnology; mixture of speech accompanies mixture 
of communities, and often its only traceable sign. 

i2. Abnormal extension of a language dependent on culture and literature; ex 
amples, Latin and Arabic; evidence of language more trustworthy in more 
ancient and ruder times. 

13. Diawbacks to physical evidence of race; modification of race-type; value ot 
linguistic evidence to the physical ethnologist. 

if. Indo-European speech and race; view sometimes held as to their relation; 
false assumption; use of the analogy of the Latin; its impropriety; extension 
of Indo-European language to be explained mainly by that of a race. 

15. Superior availability of linguistic evidence of race in respect to apprehensi- 
bility, and ease of record and study; examples of its value; pregnancy of lan- 
guage with historical indications; its part in ethnology. 

16. Difficulty of the ethnological problem; its analogy with the geological. 

17. Bearing of language on the question of human unity; negative value of its 
evilence. 

18. Lipossibility of proving by larguage the diversity of human races; unlim- 
ited variability of speech; none of its existing differences irreconcilable with 
unity of origin. 

19. Impossibility of proving unity of the human race by language; this impossi- 
bility a practical one. 

20. Ditticulties of etymologic research; diversity of words historically connected; 
resemblances, in form aud meaning, of words unconnected; examples. 

21. I'requency of false etymologies; delusive signs of relationship discoverable 
between any two known languages; Swift’s burlesque; its serious counterparts ; 
application of the doctrine of chances to linguistic coincidences; its futility. 

22. Effect of fortuitous resemblances in frustrating inquiry into the ultimate rela. 
tionship of linguistic fainilies; signs of this relationship discoverable only in 
original roots; impossibility of reaching back to the historical beginnings of 
most families; accidental correspondences among roots. 

23. Worthlessness of the traced radical correspondences between different fami- 
lies; impossibility of their extension through all the families; general ccn 
clusion. 


LECTURE XI] 


1. Review: heads of the last lecture; unpractical character of the qt estion of 
human unity. 

2. Origin of language: an extra-historical inquiry; but prepared for and simpli- 
fied by our historical investigations; how much is left to be solved. 

8. Whether men could produce the beginnings of speech; theorv of its divine 


488 ANALYSIS. 


origin; this theory unnecessary; its weakness, as generally held; in wha 
sense it is true; inadmissible supposition sometimes made. 

4. Analogy between language, and clothing and shelter; their necessity ; their 
rude beginnings; their development and perfection. 

5. Source ol the impulse to produce speech; it is from without, coming from 
desire of communication; language a social possession, production, and need; 
iinpossible to a solitary man. 

6 Language and thought not identical; in what sense man speaks because he 
thinks. 

7. Considerations showing the non-identity of thought and speech: imperfection 
of speech as representation of thought; one’s power of expression unequal to 
his power of conception and judgment; variety of expression for same 
thought —e. g., in English, Latin, French, Chinese; externality of the tie 
between idea and word; learning to think in a new tongue. 

8. Essential unlikeness of thought and its spoken, or its acted, expression. 

9. Whether thought and speech are co-extensive; claim that ideas cannot exist 
without words; its futility; illustration of word-making; the idea always 
anterior to the word. 

10. Incommensurability of thought and speech; how far and in what sense we 
think with words; we put our thought into words. 

11. What mental action is to be called thought; thought present in the deaf- 
mute; and, in a measure, in the lower animals; the latter’s approach to ca- 
pacity of language. 

12. Difference in mental action between men and lower animals; instance, the 
crow’s capacity of counting; its limits; how man transcends these limits; 
points of superiority of his powers; abstraction of qualities. 

13. Aid rendered by language to the progress of knowledge of numbers; farther 
aid of written signs; peculiar ideality of mathematical conceptions; yet all 
their signs devised by speakers; their development in different races; fortuitous 
basis of our decimal system. 

14. High importance of language to the clearness and reach of mental action; 
speech an instrumentality which the mind creates and works with. 

15. Conclusion: speech the assistant of thought; language and culture impossible 
without sociality; the beginnings of speech signs of ideas, devised for communi- 
cation; what remains of the problem of origin. 

16. The voice as means of expression; recommended by availability, not im- 
posed by necessity; other means; gesture; its employment by the deaf and 
dumb; its naturalness, and capacity of development; its original importance 
and present office; superiority of the voice. 

17 Significance of first signs; why they denoted action and quality; everything 
in all language, designated py reference to these; impossibility of directly 
signifying concrete objects; various convertibility of first signs. 

18 Theories respecting the origin of roots: onomatopoetic theory; interjectional 
theory; resonance theory; groundlessness of the last; its implication of a mira« 
cle; its discordance with linguistic history. 

19. Substantial value of the other theories; efficiency of the imitative principle 
its inclusion of both; of a more subjective symbolism misuse of ‘he ’atter 


ANALYSIS. 489 


20. Fundamental principle of the first language-making; value of tone and 
gesture. 

21. Relation of imitative signs to their ideas; aid of accompanying circumstances; 
variety of designation. 

22. liflacement of the traces of imitative origin; common weakness of the defend- 
ers of the onomatopoetic theory. 

23. Deficiencies of our knowledge as to earliest history of speech; scantiness of 
the first language; rise and final prevalence of word-making by derivation. 
24. Reproach to which our view of the subject is exposed; its groundlessness 

common error of linguistic scholars. 


LECTURE XII. 


1. Revirw: conclusions reached in the last lecture; their accordance with the 
results of our previous inquiries. 

2. Why men alone speak; essential characteristic of human Speech; supe- 
riority of man; instinct and reason; intelligence of animals; their power to 
form general ideas; their most important deficiency ; their degrees ot 
approach to speech. 

3. Advantage of speech; its relation to our social nature and to the development 
of our powers; means of handing down accumulated knowledge; growth and 
transmission of culture. 

4. Education gained in acquisition of language itself; analogy between linguis- 
tic training of a child and that of the race; between the child’s acq lisition of 
language and of knowledge; between invention of language and that of the 
locomotive engine; problem set before the language-makers, and mode of its 
solution; results of mental labor deposited in words. 

5. Constraint imposed in acquisition of language; how brought to our apprehen- 
sion; influence of past generations of speakers. 

6. Extent to which different races have availed themselves of the advantages 
implied in language; lowest and highest degrees. 

7. Necessity of writing to fullest development of uses of speech; written language 
the complement and continuation of spoken; tends to unify the whole race. 

8. Writing has a history of development; its first impulse; notable analogy in 
this respect with speech; written language at first independent of spoken. 

9. Mnemonic and symbolic objects as forerunners of writing; instances of their 
use; fullest elaboration of the method, the guippos. . 

10. Picture-writing; American example; germ of another method contained in 
this: analogous stage of speech. 

11. Mexican picture-writings phonetic elements in it; difference of Opinion ag 
to its general character. 

12. Egyptian writing: character of the system; its inferrible initial stage; homon- 
ymy and symbolism in the hieroglyphs; derivation of phonetic and alphabetie 
signs; mixture, in practice, of signs of various kind; derivation of hieratic 
and demotic modes of writing; Coptic alphabet. 

13. Chinese writing: its forerunners; its beginnings, hieroglyphs; their combina 


49) ANALYSIS. 


tion: symbol.c application; introduction of a phonetic element; illustration 
signs used in many combinations. . 

14. Changes of form of the Chinese characters; analogies in speech, relations of 
Chinese writing to the language it represents. 

15. Cuneiform modes of writing; their variety; their beginnings; reason of 
their form; Persian alphabetic cuneiform. 

16. Syllabic alphabets; examples, Japanese and Cherokee. 

17. Partially syllabic alphabets; ancient Semitic; ground of its peculiar char- 
acter; Phenician alphabet; its possible derivation; names of its letters. 

18. Spread of the Phenician alphabet; its perfection by the Greeks; first realiza- 
tion of the idea of a true alphabet. 

19 Derivatives of the Greek alphabet; the Latin alphabet. 

20. Derivation of English letters; Greek conversions of Phenician signs, and 
additions; Latin modifications, omissions, and additions; later modifications 
and adilitions. 

21. Relation of English written alphabet to spoken; causes of anomalous Eng- 
lish orthography. 

22. Demerits of English mode of spelling; ground on which its maintenance 
may be defended; false grounds on which it is commonly supported; worth- 
lessness of the etymologic principle; reasons for wishing a phonetic reform. 

23. Prospects of the English as a world-language; its character as a language, 
judged by the test of literature; value of this test; the two marked peculiarities 
of the language: its uninflective character; analogy and contrast with Chines3 
in this respect; its mixed structur2; compensating advantages of the latter. 

24. General conclusion; ipfluences to be relied upon for maintaining and im- 
proving English. 


INDEX. 


—¢—— 


A, the letter, derivation of, 464. 

a, flattening of, in dance, etc., 43. 

@ or an, article, 115. 

-a/e, 40-41. 

abstract, 112. 

Abyssinia. Semitic languages of, 297, 
293. 

Abyssinian group of Hamitic languages, 
341, 343. 

Accent, inakes unity of word, 56; how 
produced, 89; its various place in 
different languages, 95-6. 

Accidental correspondences between 
words unrelated, 185, 243-4, 387-91. 

Achemenidan monuments, 222; char- 
acter in which they are written, 460. 

Acquisition of language, how made, 
11-20; acquisition of mental training 
and knowledge involved in it, 442-5. 

Adelung. referred to, 4. 

Adjectives, in Indo-European language, 
275; English nouns directly con- 
vertible into, 282. 

Adverbs in Indo-European language, 
275-6. 

folic dialect of ancient Greek, 221. 

Afghan or Pushto language, 192, 224. 

Atrica, languages of, 297, 299, 340-46. 

again, 115. 

Ageglutinative structure of Scythian 
languages, 316-20; of Dravidian, 327. 

Agglutinative tongues, their charac- 
teristics, classification, and relations, 
360-65. 

Ainos, language of, 329. 

alas, 277. 

Albanian language, descendant of an- 
cient [lyrian, 191, 290-91, 355. 

Alemannic dialect of Old High-Ger- 
man, 163, 211. 

Alforas of Australia, language of, 340. 

Algonquin group of American lan- 


ally, 29. 
alms, 29, 102, 387. 
alphabet, 460. 


Alphabet, spoken, structure and icia 
tions of, 91; primitive alphabet of 
Indo-European language, 265; its 
development, 266; limited alphabets 
of Polynesian languages, 338. 

Alphabet, written, germs of in Egypt, 
454-5; derivation of alphabetic cu- 
neiform, 460; syllabic alphabets, 460- 
61; Semitic alphabet and its deriva- 
tives, 461-3; Greek and its deriva- 
tives, 463; Latin, 464-6; English, 
466-7. 

also, 111, 114. 

Altaic family of languages —see Scy- 
thian. 

am, 62-3, 115, 135, 267. 

America, the English language in, 151, 
171-4. 

America, aboriginal languages of, 346- 
53; their variety and changeable- 
ness, 346-7; probable unity, 348; 
polysynthetic structure, 348; princi- 
pal groups in North America, 350 
-51; question of their relation to 
Asiatic languages, 330, 351; absurd 
theories respecting this, 352; impor- 
tance to us of their study, 352. 

American aborigines, examples of pict- 
ure-writing by, 450-82. 

Amharic language, of Abyssinia, 297, 
299. 

an or a, article, 115. 

-ana, 140. 

Analogies, extension of prevailing, its 
influence in producing the changes 
of language, 27-8, 82, 85. 

Analogies between linguistic and cer- 
tain physical sciences, 46—7, 52. 

Analysis, etymological, of words, 55 
seq.; is the retracing of a previous 
historical synthesis, 65-7, 251-4; 
indispensable in comparison of lan- 
guages, 246. 

Analytical tendency in modern lan- 

uages, 120, 279; its ground, 280-86 

and, 115. 

(491) 


492 


Andaman is'ands, people and language 
of, 339. 

Anglo-Saxon language, ancestor of 
English, 24; its relations to the other 
Germanic languages, 210. 

Animals lower than man, mental ac- 
tion of, 414-17, 439; how near some 
of them approach to capacity of lan- 
guage, 415, 440; reason of their inca- 
vacity, 438-40. 

Annamese language, 336. 

Antiquity of human race, 205, 382-3. 

apprehend, 112, 133. 

Arabic alphabet, origin and diffusion 
of, 462. 

Arabic language, 294, 296-7, 301 seq., 
306 ; its literature, 299-300; its spread, 
299, 300, 346, 375. 

Ayamaic branch of Semitic languages, 
297, 298. 

Arbitrariness and conyentionality of 
words, as signs for ideas, 14, 32, 71, 
102, 438. 

Armenian language, 192, 224; char- 
acter in which it is written, 463. 

Armorican language of Brittany, 190, 
218. 

Arrow-headed characters — see Cunei- 
form. 

Articles, origin of, 115, 276. 

Articulate sounds, how produced, 70, 
87-91; their systematic arrangement 
and relations, 91; transitions, 92-8; 
office as means of expression, 421-3; 
have no inherent natural significance, 
430-31; cannot represent exactly in- 
articulate sounds, 451-2. 

Artificial languages, 50-51, 444; arti- 
ficial terminology, 122. 

Aryan branch of Indo-European lan- 
guage, 192, 201. 

Aryan, name for Indo-European, 192. 

as, 111, 114. 

Asia, languages of, 192, 222-7, 294- 
837, 3854-5. P 

saspirates, or aspirated mutes, 93, 265 
note. 

Assimilation of consonants, 93-4. 

Assimilation of dialects, 160-61, 181. 

Association, mental, the only tie be- 
tween words and their meanings, 
14, 71, 128, 409-10. 

Assyrian people and language, 295, 297. 

Athapaskan group of American Jan- 
guages, 350. 

end, 178. 

Attenuation of the meaning of words 
and elements of words, 114-20. 

Attic dialect of ancient Greek, 221. 


INDEX. 


Augment in Indo-European verbs, 267, 
292. 

Australia, language of, 339-40. 

Austrian dialect of Old High-G rman 
211; Austrian dialectic elements in 
modern German, 163. 

Auxiliary and relational words, their 
production, 117-20. 

Avesta, Zoroastrian scripture, 222 

Aztecs, language of, 351. 


Baber, the emperor, memoirs of, 313. 

Bantu family — see South-African. 

Bashkir, Turkish language, 310. 

Basque language, in Spain, 191, 353-4 
363. 

Bavarian dialect of Old High-German, 
168, 211. 

be, 115. 

bear, 242. 

become, 108. 

befall, 113. 

Beginnings, of Indo-Eurepean lan- 
guage, 250 seq.; of language in gen- 
eral, 423-6. 

Bengali language, 224. 

Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon poem, 210. 

Berber languages, 341, 343. 

better, 381. 

bishop, 244, 387. 

blame, 262. 

blast, 262. 

Bleek, Dr. W. H. J., referred to, 344 
note. 

board, 107. 

boatswain, 72. 

body, 115. 

Bohemian language, 191, 214. 

Bopp, Professor Franz, referred to, 5 
200, 245 note. 

Bornu, language of, 246. 

Borrowing of foreign words, its range 
and amount, 185, 197-8; into Eng. 
lish vocabulary, 143-7. 

bow-wow, 425. 

Bow-wow theory of origin of language, 
426 seq. 

Brahui language, 327. 

breakfast, 56. 

Breton language, 190, 218. 

brother, 196. 

Brown, Rey. N., referred to, 337 note, 

Bulgarian language, 191, 214. 

3uriats, language of, 312. 

Burmese language, 336, 359. 

Burnouf, M. Eugene, refered to, 5. 

Bushmen, language of, 341, 345. 

butterfly, 71. 


INDEX. 


C, the letter, derivation of, 465. 

Cesar, 105-6. 

calculate, 130. 

Caldwell, Rey. R., referred to, 327 note. 

calm, 468. 

Cambodian language, 336. 

can, 111. 

Canaanitic branch of Semitic languages, 
297. 

Canarese language, 326. 

candid, 127, 133. 

candidate, 126, 127, 131, 133. 

Carthage, language ot, 295, 298. 

Cases, their number, origin, and office 
in Indo- European. language, 271-5; 
their loss in English, 77; in other 
languages, 274; replacement, 230-81; 
cases in Semitic language, 304; in 
Scythian, 319. 

Castrén, Professor Alexander, referred 
to, 310, 315. 

Caucasian languages, 354-5. 

Celtic languages, obliterated by Latin 
in southern Europe, 166, 216-17; by 
Germanic language in England, 169; 
their classitication, age, ‘literatures, 
etc., 190, 215-18; their position in 
{Indo-European family, 204. 

Celtomania, 216. 

Central America, language and culture 
of, 347, 351. 

Chaldee language, 297, 298. 

Champollion, referred to, 341. 

Chances, doctrine of, as applied to lin- 
guistic resemblances, 390. 

Change, linguistic, its kinds, necessity, 
and universality, 24-33; forces pro- 
ducing it, 35-46, 48-9; considerations 
determining it in special cases, 41; 
phonetic or external change, 42-3; 
constructive, 55-65, 70, 73-4; de- 
structive, 74-98; internal change, of 
meaning, 100-135, 141-2; relations 
of external and internal change, 101; 
varying rate and kind of change, 137- 
53; processes of change are what, 1545 
linguistic change causes the growth 
of dialects, 154-5, 159; generally of 
slow and gradual progress, 44, 123, 
183, 277-8; exceptional cases of rapid 
change, 137, 291, 347. 

charity, 102. 

Cheremiss language, 309. 

Cherokee language, 350; word-phrase 
of, 349; alphabet of native invention, 

61. 

Chinese language, its age, 233-4, 332; 
monosyllabic character, 257, 330-31, 
359; history, literature, etc., 332-6; 


4993 


merit, 336, 367; supplemented by it¢ 
written characters, 458 ; compared 
with English, 331, 471-2. 

Chinese writing, preceded by use of 
knotted cords, 450, 455; history of 
455-9 ; relation to the spoken lan 
guage, 458. 

Choctaw language, 350. 

Chuana family — see South-African. 

Chukchi language, 329. 

church, 472. 

Chureh-Slavic language, 214. 

Circassian language, 354. 

Civilization, degree of, of Indo-Euro- 
pean mother-tribe, 207-8. 

Classification of languages, by genetic 
relationship, how effected, 185-6, 290; 
review of families thus "established, 
292-357; its uncertainties, 323, B57- 
8; its preéminent value, 369-70 
classification by structural corre- 
spondence, 358-67 ; by positive value, 
367-9. 

Classification of conceptions, learned 
along with language, 12. 

cleave, 387. 

Clicks in South African languages, 345. 

Clothing, analogy between language 
and, 401-3. 

Cochin- -China, language of, 336. 

cock, 429. 

cockade, 429. 

Comanche language, 351. 

Combination of independent elements 
into words, 55-67; our words univer- 
sally so made up, 65-7, 251-5; com- 
bination promotes, and is aided by, 
phonetic change, 70, 73-4; accompa- 
nied by change of meaning, 116; 
now of limited 1 range in English, RES 
147-8, 282. 

comfort, 135. 

Communication, its possibility makes 
the unity of a language, 22, 157; it 
keeps language uniform, 155-61, 183; 
impulse to it, the immediate producer 
of spoken language, 403-5; of writ- 
ing, 448-9. 

Community, makes and changes lan- 
guage, 45, 123, 148, 404; preserves 
unity of a language, 1553 how and 
within what limits it works, 156-8, 
161; effects of external conditions 
upon, 149. 

Comparative method in modern study 
of language, 3, 240-48 ; how to ba 
applied, 241-6; not a mere compari- 
son of words, 246-7; its universas 
reach, 248. 


494 


Comparative philology, 8, 241. 

Composition of words —see Combina- 
tion. 

concrete, 112. 

Confucius, representative man of China, 
Baa. 

Conjugation, forms of, in Indo-Euro- 
pean language, 266-9 ; in its later 
dialects, 26/-70; their loss by pho- 
netic corruption in English, 75-7, 
86-7 ; conjugational forms in Se- 
mitic language, 303; in Scythian, 
319-20. 

Conjugations, irregular and regular, in 
English, 79-82. 

Conjugations, of Semitic verb, 304; of 
Seythian, 319; of South-African, 345. 

Conjunctions, in Indo-European lan- 
guage, 276. 

Consciousness, different degrees of, in 
the processes of language-making, 
40-41, 50, 121-4. 

Consciousness, different subjection of 
mental action to, in man and lower 
animals, 440. 

Conservative forces in linguistic tradi- 
tion, 31, 43-4, 148-51, 159. 

Consonants and vowels, relation of, 89, 
91. 

Constraining influence of acquisition 
of language on mental action, 445-6. 

Conventionality of words, as signs of 
ideas, 14, 82, 71, 128, 148, 409-10, 
438. 

copper, 130. 

Coptic language, 340-41; writing, 455. 

coquette, 429. 

Corean Junguage, 329. 

Cornish language, 216, 218. 

could, 468. 

count, 261. 

court, ete., 108. 

cover, 388. 

Craik, Rev. G. L., referred to, 211 note. 

Creek language, 350. 

Crow, its power of numeration, 415-17. 

Cultivated or learned dialects, 149-51, 
182-4. 

Cultivation of a language, its meaning 
an effect, 182-4. 

Culture and education, conservative 
influence of, on language, 17, 149-51, 
158-9. 

Cult ire, only possible by means of Jan- 
guage, 441; won in the acquisition 
of language, 441-5, 

Cuneiform characters, origin of, 459-60; 
monuments, in these characters, of 
Persia, 222; of Assyria, 295; Persian 


INDEX. 


language of, 222; Semitic, 306; as 
serted Ugrian, 814-15. 

Curtius, Professor George, referred to, 
200. 

Cymric group of Celtic languages, 190 
217. 


Cyril, Slavic Bible-version of, 214. 
czar, 106. 


-d, ending of English preterits, origin 
of, 60, 81-2, 117, 235. 

daguerreotype, 39. 

dahlia, 146. 

Dakota language, 350. 

Danish language, 212. 

Darfur, language of, 346. 

daughter, 196. 

Dead languages, 149-50. 

Deaf-mutes, language of, 410-11, 413 
422; thought of, 414. 

dealt, 79. 

dear me !, 277. 

Decimal system of numeration, on what 
founded, 419. 

Declension, forms of, in Indo-European 
language, 270-74; in its later dia- 
lects, 274-5; their loss by phonetic 
corruption, 77-9. — See also Cases. 

Dekhan, languages of, 224, 326. 

Delaware or Algonquin group of Amer- 
ican languages, 350. 

Demotic, later Egyptian, alphabet, 456. 

Dialects, their prevalence, 153-4; their 
explanation, 154-62; causes which 
bring about dialectic diversity, 154-5; 
which restrain it, 155-6, 159; which 
reduce it, 160-61; illustrations of dia- 
lectic divergence and convergence 
162-74; dialects of English, 170-71; 
in America, 171-4; dialectic growth 
everywhere inevitable, 174, 181-2; 
dialect and language convertible 
terms, 175; erroneous views respect- 
ing dialects, 177-84; dialectic differ- 
ences always imply original unity, 
178-81. 

did, 268; forms ending of English pret- 
erits, 60-61, 81-2, 235; auxiliary, 117, 

Ding-dong theory of origin of language, 
427. 


discuss, 112. 

Divine origin of language, in what 
sense to be accepted, 399-403. 

doff, 116, 262. 

don, 116, 262. 

Doric dialect of ancient Greek, 221. 

double, 62. 

Dravidian languages of southern India 
198, 326-7. 


EINDEX. 


Duai number, in verbs, 267; in nouns, 
273; its loss, 274. 
Dutch language, 164, 211. 


E, the letter, derivation of, 464. 

Eddas, Old Norse collections, 212. 

Ed&cation gained in the acquisition of 
language, 13, 15-16, 441-5. 

Education, conservative influence of, 
upon ianguage, 17, 149-51, 158-9. 

Egypt, languages of, 150, 234, 340-43. 

Egyptian modes of writing, 452-4. 

Ehkili language, 299. 

tiher or either, 43,95. 

electricity, 129. 

English language, bow acquired by its 
speakers, 10-22; its differences in 
individuals, 16-22; what, in general, 
it is, 22; how kept in existence, 23; 
its constant change, 24; causes and 
modes of this change, 25-31, 140-48; 
examples of the changes which have 
brought it into its present state, 55- 
65, 70-87, 92-5, 97, 102-34; its der- 
ivation and history, 24, 31, 99, 147, 
169-70; its periods, 210; mixture of 
Germanic and other elements in it, 
84, 144, 170, 185, 198, 373, 472-3: its 
fundamental structure chiefly Ger- 
manic, i70, 198; position aid rela- 
tions as a Germanic language. 187-9, 
210-13 ; as an Indo-European lan- 
guage. 189-200; its analytical char- 
acter, 279, 282, 284; prevailing mono- 
syllabism, 264-5, 279; comparison 
with Chinese, 331, 471-2; its dialects, 
170-71; transfer to America, 171-2; 
British and American forms of, 172- 
4; prospects as a world-language, 
470; merits, 470-74. 

English orthography, anomalies of, 94, 
467-9; reform desirable, 469-70. 

English spoken alphabet, structure and 
relations of, 91. 

English written alphabet, derivation 
and character of, 466-7. 

Erse, or Scotch Gaelic, language, 190. 

Eskimo language, 330, 350, 351. 

Eisthonia, Scythian languages in, 309. 

Ethiopian or Abyssinian group of fla- 
mitic languages, 341, 343. 

Ethiopic or Geéz, a Semitic, language, 
297, 299. 

Ethnology, bearing of linguistic science 
on, 8, 370-94. 

Etruscan language, 354. 

"tymology, the foundation of linguistic 
science, 54-5, 238; its uncertainties, 


495 


dangers, and ill-repute, 239, 386-94 
modern improvements of, 240, 244 
285-7; is not the whole science, 247, 
false etymologies, 388-90. 

Etymology of a word the explanation 
uf its origin. not the ground of its use 
14, 128-9, 132-4. 

Euguvine — tablets, 
ments, 220. 

Euphony, seat of, in the mouth, not the 
ear, 90. 

Europe, languages of, 186-91, 209-21, 
309-10, 353-5. 

Expression, dependent upon an exter- 
nal inducement, not an internal im- 
pulse, 403-5, 420-21; always incom- 
plete, 20, 109-11, 406-7; variety of 
expression for same idea in different 
languages, 407-9; the voice as means 
of, 421-3. 

eye, LOL. 


Umbrian monu 


F,, the letter, derivation of, 465. 

Families of languages, how established, 
290-92. 

Family languages, so called, 363. 

Farrar, Rev. I’. W., referred to, vi. note. 

Farther India, languages of, 336-7. 

Juther, 179. 

Fellatah language, 346. 

Finnish language, 191, 309, 320, 361; 
its literature, 314. 

Finno-Hungarian branch of Scythian 
language — see Ugrian. 

Firdusi, Persian poet, 223, 325. 

Jive, 196. 

Flemish language, 211. 

Florida group of American ianguages, 
300 


Jor, 114. 

SJorehead, 56. 

Sorget, 113. 

Sorgive, 1138. 

Formative elements, 63-7; derived 
from words originally independent, 
66, 251-5; their production gradual 
and unreflective, 124; aided by pho- 
netic corruption, 73-4; accompanying 
change of meaning, 117; extensibil- 
ity of their application, 83-4; their 
distinction as primary and secondary, 
255. 

fortnight, 56. 

Sra, 111. 

Frankish dialect of Old High-German, 
163, 211. 

Freedom of mental action restricted by 
acquisition of language, 445-6. 

French language, 164-5, 189, 218-19. 


496 


Germanic and Celtic elements in, 168, 
169, 374. 

Fricative sounds, in alphabet, 91. 

Frisian lancuage, 211. 

-ful, suffix, 57, 73. 

Fulah language, 346. 

Fusion of dialects into one, 161; causes 
determining character of result, 168-9. 

Future in Romanic languages, 118; in 
Anglo-Saxon and English, 119 ; in 
Indo-European language, 268. 


G, the letter, derivation of, 465. 

Gabelentz, H. C. von der, referred to, 
339 note. 

Gadhelic group of Celtic 
190, 217. 

Gaelic languages, 190, 217. 

Galla language, 341. 

Gallatin, Albert, referred to, 249 note. 

galvanism, 89, 129. 

Gaulish languages of France ete., 216- 
ibe 

Geéz or Ethiopic language, 297, 299. 

Gender, grammaties). in Indo-European 
languages, 77-8, 273-4; lost in Eng- 
lish, 78; in other languages, 275; 
gender in Semitic verbs, 303; nouns, 
8045 in Hamitic languages, 342; gen- 
der wanting in Seyvthian languages, 
319; in other families, 342-3. 

(zenetic relationship of languages, 186, 
20; their classification by it — see 
Classification. 

Genius of individuals, its effect on lan- 
guage, 123. 

genteel, yentile, gentle, 111 

Geology, general analogy between and 
linguistic science, 475 analogies in 
special points, 62, 184, 253, 265, 382. 

Georgian language, 354-5. 

Gerinan language, history of, 162-4. 

Germanic languages, 187-9; their clas- 
sification, age. literatures, ete., 210- 
13; permutation of consonants in, 
97-8; verbal conjugation of, 80-82, 
269-70. 

Germanic race, its part in history, 231. 

Gesture as means of expression, 422-3, 
43]. 

get, 198. 

Gonds, language of, 327. 

Gothic language, 213. 

-yraph, 140. 

Greece, founder of Indo-European pre- 
eminence, 239-31. 

Greek language, 190, 220-22. 

green, 125. 

Greenland, language of, 350. 


languages, 


INDEX. 


Grimm, Professor Jacob, referred to, 4 
5; his law of permutation of consa 
nants in Germanic languages, 97-8. 

Grout, Rev. L., referred to, 344 note. 

grow, 115. 

Gue-s, George, inventor of Cherokee 
alphabet, 461. 

Gypsy language, 225. 


H, the letter, derivation of, 465. 

Habit, the ground of ability in lan- 
guage, 117, 147-8, 282. 

Hadley, Professor James, referred to, 
84 note, 211 note. 

Hamitic family of languages, 341-3. 

hand, 115. 

Harmonic sequence of vowels in Scyth- 
ian languages, 318, 362. 

have, 117-18, 199. 

head, 107, 115. 

Helirew language, 294, 296, 297, 306, 
308; its alphabet, 462. 

Heldensagen, Middle High - German, 
212. 

Heliand, Old Saxon poem, 211. 

help, 30, 81, 82. 

Heyse, Professor K. W. L., referred to, 
427. 

Hieratic, later Egyptian, writing, 455. 

Hieroglyphic writing, 450-59 ; of Egypt, 
452-5; of China, 455-6: hieroglyphic 
ortgin of cuneiform writing, 459. 

High-German languages, 163-4, 188, 
210, 211-12. 

hill, 14. 

Himalayas, languages of, 337. 

Himyaritic languave, 297, 299. 

Hindi language, 224. 

Hindustani language, 224. 

Historical spelling in English, 94, 467. 

Hodgson, Mr. B. H., relerred to, 337 
note. 

home, 133. 

Homer, poems of, 221, 

Homonyms in English, 334-5, 387; in 
Chinese, 334; how distinguished in 
Chinese writing, 456-7. 

horse, 195. 

Hottentots, language of, 341; clicks in 
it, 345. 

IJuman race, its antiquity, 295, 382-s, 
its unity not determinable by lan« 
guage, 383-94. 

Humboldt, Wilhelm von, referred to, 5, 
367. 

Hungarian language, 191, 309, 320, 361; ° 
its literature, 314; traces of polysym+ 
thesis in, 349. 

Huzvaresh or Pehlevi language, 228. 


INDEX. 


i, the letter, derivation of, 404, 465. 

7 (pronoun), 101. 

Icelandic language, 203, 212. 

Ideas antecedent to their names, 125, 
412. 

Ilivrian language, 191. 

linitation of natural signs, efficient 
principle in the origin of language, 
426-31; not servilely precise, 431-2. 

important 112. 

lhiaccuracies of speech, their causes and 
their part in the history of language, 
27-31, 36-7. 

tnpplicabilities, 64. 

Incorporative or polysynthetic struct- 
ure, 348-9, 354, 363. 

India, languages of, 224-9, 326-7; oc- 
cupation of its northern part by Indo- 
European peoples, 201, 326. 

Indian, 130. 

Individuals, all changes of language 
ultimately their work, 35-46, 123-4, 
125, 148, 154-5, 404; their diversity 
causes divergence of dialects, 154-5; 
differences of their speech within the 
same community, 16-22, 156-8, 181. 

Indo-European family of languages, 
other names for, 192; how composed, 
186-92, 210-29; genetic relationship 
of its constituents, 193, 197, 378; evi- 
dences of their common descent, 193- 
200; interconnections of its branches, 
203-4; place and time of its original 
speakers unknown, 200-205; their 
civilization, #05-8; importance of the 
family to linguistic science, 3, 229-37 ; 
age and variety of its dialects, 233-6 ; 
earliest history of development, 250- 
87; historical beginnings, 250-66; 
roots, pronominal and verbal, 258- 
63; primitive spoken alphabet, 265; 
growth of forms and parts of speech, 
266-77; rate and continuousness of 
growth, 277-8; synthetic and ana- 
lytic development, 279-86; charac- 
teristic structure of Indo-European 
language, 292-4, 361-3; question of 
its ultimate connection with Semitic 
language, 307, 361, 394; its limits 
probably mainly coincident with 
those of a race, 377-9. 

{ndo-Germanic family — see Indo-Eu- 
ropean. 

inflectional languages, 358. 

Indlective character of Indo-European 
language, 293, 361; wherein it con- 
sists, 293-4, 366 note; Semitic lan- 
guage inflective, 300, 381; value of 
inflective principle, 362. 


32 


407 


Instinct and reason, 439. 

intellect, 112. 

Intellectuai terms derived from physi 
eal, 111-13. 

Interjectional theory of origin of lan: 
guage, 426-7, 429-30. 

Interjections, 276-7. 

Internal change in language, 100-121. 

Invention of language by men, what is 
meant by, 443-4. 

Ionic dialect of ancient Greek, 221. 

Iranian branch of Indo-European lan 
guage, 192, 222-4. 

Trish language, 190, 217, 218. 

Troquois group of American languages 
350. 

Irregularities in English declension and 
conjugation, 78-81. 

irrevocability, 254. 

is, 63, 115, 179. 

island, 468. - 

isle, 468. 

-ism, 140. 

Isolating languages — see Monosylla- 
bic. 

Italian language, 165, 168, 189, 219. 

Italic group of Indo-European lan- 
guages, 220. 

ats, 30. 


J, the letter, derivation of, 465, 466. 

Jagataic Turkish language, 313. 

Japanese language, 328-9; modes of 
writing, 829, 460-61. 

Japhetic family — see Indo-European. 


K, the letter, derivation of, 465. 

Kafir group of South-African lan: 
guages, 345. 

Kalevala, Finnish poem, 314. 

Kalmucks, language of, 312. 

Kamchatkan language, 329. 

Karen language, 336. 

Khalkas, language of, 312. 

Khitan, Tungusic dynasty, 312. 

Khonds, language of, 327. 

Kin, Tungusic dynasty, 312. 

kind, 108. 

kine, 44. 

Kirghiz language, 310. 

knight, 42. 

Kols, language of, 327. 

Koran, Mohammedan scripture, 29% 

Koriak language, 329. 

Kotars, language of, 327. 

Kroatian language, 214. 

Kurdish language, 192, 224. 

Kurilian language, 328, 329. 

Kwanto, of Farther India, 336. 


498 INDEX. 


kye, 44. 


Labial series of articulate sounds, 91. 

laird, 388. 

Language, in what aspect the subject 
of linguistic science, 6, 10, 54; inter- 
est of inquiries into, 7-8; how ac- 
quired by those who speak, 11-22; 
what a language is, 22; how kept in 
existence, 23; dead languages, 149- 
50; constant change or growth of 
language, 24-33; by what instru- 
mentality produced, 35-46, 125, 154; 
processes of growth, 55-1385; rate 
and kind of growth, and causes af- 
fecting it, 187-53; dialects, 153-85; 
the various forms of human lan- 
guage and their genetic classitica- 
tion, 185-229, 294-357; other modes 
of classification, 357-70; relation of 
language to race, 14-15, 370-83; its 
evidence incapable of determining 
the question of human unity, 383-94; 
language an institution, the work of 
its speakers, 48, 401-3, 442-5; its 
conventional character, 32, 409-10; 
it is a social product and possession, 
404: part taken by individuals and 
by the community, respectively, in its 
production, 45, 148, 154-6, 171; lan- 
guage rot identical with thought, nor 
indispensable to it, but its instrument 
and aid, 405-21; its imperfection as 
means of expression, 20, 109-11, 
406-7 ; its value to man, 440-47; 
education involved in its acquisition, 
13, 15-16, 441-3; its constraining in- 
fluence on mental action, 445-6; its 
work supplemented by writing, 447— 
9; origin of language, in what sense 
divine, 399-403; desire of communi- 
cation its direct impulse, 403-5; its 
beginnings of what kind, 421-6; how 
produced, 426-34; example of de- 
velopment of a language from such 
beginnings, 250-87; language a hu- 
man possession only, 399, 414-17, 
438-40. 

Language, science or study of —see 
Linguistze science. 

Langue d'oc, 164, 218. 

Lapps, language of, 191, 309. 

Latin language, its age, literature, etc., 
219-20; its relations in Italy, 165, 
220: history of its extension in south- 
ern Europe, 165-9; causes of this, 

75, 378, 382; its artificially pro- 
longed existence, 150; its modern 

’ descendants, 167, 218-19; its spoken 


alphabet, 465; its written alphabet 
463-4, 465-6. 

Latin words, introduction of, into Eng- 
lish, 143-6; Latinized style of Eng: 
lish, 146. 

learn, 262. 

led, 80. 

Lena, branch of Turkish ianguage up- 
on, 310-11. 

Lepsius, Professor R., referred to, 94 
note, 341 note, 344 note. 

Lesghian language, 355. 

-less, 58. 

Lettish language, 191, 215. 

Libvan languages, 341, 343. 

lie, 75-6. 

Life of a language, what is meant by 
82, 385; its analogy with that of an 
organized being, or of a race of such, 
46; the processes constituting — 
see Change, linguistic. 

like, im such and which, 57, 70; in -ly, 
58-60, 70, 73; the verb, 108, 113. 

likewise, 114. 

Lingual series of articulate sounds, 19. 

Linguistic change or growth — see 
Change, linguistic. 

Linguistic evidence of race, its nature 
and limitations, 371-9. 

Linguistic scholars, differences of tem- 
perament among, 324. 

Linguistic science, of recent develop- 
ment, 1; its preparatory stages, 1-3: 
its progress, 3-6; its material, 6, 50, 
230; its objects and their interest, 
6-8 ; what it seeks in language, 10, 54, 
237; analogies between it and certain 
physical sciences, 46-48, 52; it is a 
historical science, 48-52 ; its truly 
scientific character, 53; its method, 
52, 54-3, 237-48; its dependence on 
Indo-European comparative philolo- 
gy, 4, 233-7. 

Literary culture, its influence on the 
history of language, 23, 37, 43-5, 
148-51, 159-60, 182-4. 

Literary languages, 149-50, 174; their 
usual origin, 164. 

Lithuanian group of languages, 191, 
215. 

Little-Russian language, 214. 

Livonia, Scythian languages of, 809. 

Livonian language, 191, 215. 

Local dialects, acquired in learning te 
talk, 16-17. 

Loo-Choo islands, language of, 329. 

lord, 388. 

lore, 262. 


i ri 


INDEX. 


Loss of words from the vocabulary of a 
language, 27, 98-100. 

Louis, St., of France, as language- 
maker, 38. 

love, 260. 

Low-German languages, 188, 210-11. 

luna etc., 103, 104. 

lunatic, 105, 130, 131. 

Luther’s influence on history of German 
language, 163. 

-ly, 58-60, 63, 83, 124, 235. 

Lyell, Sir Charles, referred to, 47 note. 


magnet, 120. 

Magyar — see Hungarian. 

Mahratta language, 224. 

Malayalam or Malabar language, 326. 

Malay language, 338. 

Malay-Polynesian family of languages, 
337-9. 

Man, Isle of, its language, 190. 

Man, sole possessor of language, 399, 
438; difference of his mental ca- 
pacity and action from that of the 
lower animals, 414-16, 438-40; the 
artificer of his own speech, 48, 401-3, 
442-5; value of speech to him, 440- 
47. 

Manchu language, 312, 313, 320; its 
written character, 313, 402. 

Mandingo language, 846. 

manumit, 13(). 

manure, 111. 

Marsh, Mr. G. P., referred to, 211 note. 

me, 196, 430. 

mean, 263. 

Melanesian family of languages, 339. 

men, 79. 

Mental action of men and animals, com- 
parison of, 414-17, 438-40. 

Mesopotamia, Semitic languages of, 
295. 

Mexico, language and culture of, 347, 
349, 351; writing of, 451-2. 

Middle High-German period and litera- 
ture, 212. 

Migration, effect of, on language, 202. 

Minnesingers, 212. 

mint, 130. 

minute, 111. 

Mishna, Rabbinic Ilebrew work, 297. 

Mithridates, work of Adelung etce., 4. 

Mitsjeghian language, 355. 

Mixture of language, 197-9; of ele- 
ments in English language, 84, 143-4, 
170, 185, 472-3. 

Mixture of races, 374; its effect upon 
language, 160-61, 168, 374-6. 


499 


Mnemonic objects, as forerunners a 
writing, 450. 

Modern Greek language, 221. 

Meeso-Gothic language, 60, 199, 213 
255. 

Mohammed, arouser of the Arab race 
296. i 

money, 180, 131, 247-8. 

Mongolian family — see Scythian. 

Mongolian branch of Sevthian lan. 
guages, 311-12, 813, 820; its writter 
character, 313, 462. 

Monosyllabic family of languages, 330- 
37; monosyllabic class, 858-65. 

Monosyllabism, primitive, of Indo 
European language, 255-66, 279-86 : 
secondary monosyllabism of English 
etc., 264, 279; compared with Chi- 
nese, 351, 472. 

month, 104. 

Moods of Indo-European verb, 268; of 
Semitic, 803. 

moon, 103-5. 

Moral terms derived from physical, 
111-13. 

Moravian language, 214. 

Mordwinian language, 309. 

Morphological correspondence as sigr. 
of genetic relationship, 291, 3832, 
357-8 ; systems of morphological 
classification, 358-67. 

mother, 196. 

mountain, 14. 

Miller, Professor Max, quoted or re- 
ferred to, vii, 4 note, 35, 51 note, 
177 note, 180, 3817, 560, 3638, 427. 

Mutes, class of articulations, 91; aspi- 
rated, 265 note. 

Mutes, language of — see Deaf-mutes. 


Nabatean literature, 298. 

Names-giving, processes of, 25-6, 38- 
42, 103-31, 411-12, 424-6; different 
degrees of retlectiveness in, 121-4, 
are historical, and founded in con- 
venience only, 127, 129; compara- 
tive ease of naming different classes 
of conceptions, 194-5. 

Namol!o language, 329. 

Nasal articulations, 91. 

National character as expressed ig 
speech, 152. 

Negative prefix, 292. 

Negritos, language of, 339. 

Nestorian people and language, 298. 

Netherlands, language of, 211. 

Newfoundland, 71-2. 

New Guinea and neighboring islands 
language of, 339. 


500 


New High-German period of German, 
212. 

Nibelungen-lied, old German epic, 212. 

Nomadic languages, so called, 363. 

Normans, adoption of French language 
bx, 169; their introduction of it into 
England, 169, 189. 

Norwegian language, 212. 

Nouns, substantive and adjective, their 
development from roots, 270-75 ; 
question whether nouns or verbs are 
original, 423-6. 

Numbers, in conjugation, 267; in de- 
clension, 273; in Semitic languages, 
303, 804; in Polynesian languages, 
339. 

Numerals as proofs of Indo-European 
unity, 194; examples, 198. 

Numeration in Indo-European and 
other languages, 419; reason of its 
usual decimal basis, 419. 


O, the letter, derivation of, 464. 
Obsolete and obsolescent words, 98-9. 
of, 111, 114, 120. 

off, 111, 114. 

Old Bactrian language, 222. 

Old High-German period of German, 
211, 

Old Norse language — see Icelandic. 

Old Prussian language, 191, 215. 

Old Saxon language, 211. 

Old Slavonic language, 214. 

-vlogy, 140. 

Onomatopeeia, the main effective prin- 
ciple in the origination of language, 
495-6, 428-34. 

Onomatopoetic theory of origin of lan- 
guage, 426. 

Ory tio. ’ 

Organism of language, what is meant 
by. 35, 46. 

Origin of language, approximation to 
it by historical research, 397-8; doc- 
trine of divine origin, in what sense 
alone true, 399-403; due to an 
external inducement, the desire of 
communication, 403-5; language not 
originated by thought, but by men 
for the uses of thought, 405-21; char- 
acteristic mental action of men, lead- 
ing to it, 414-18, 458-40; beginnings 
of language, of what kind, 421-6, 
exemplified in beginnings of Indo- 
European language, 250-61; various 
theories to account for their produc- 
tion, 426-7; onomatopeeia, or imita- 
tion of natural sounds, the main efii- 
cient principle, 427-34, 437. 


INDEX. 


Urochon, Tungusic tribes, 319 
Oscan language, 165, 220. 
Osmanli Turkish, 314. 
Ossetic language, 192, 224. 
Ossianic poems, 217. 

Ostiaks, language of, 309. 
Otomi language, 348 note. 
Ottuman turkish, 314. 

ought, owed, owned, 111. 


P, the letter, derivation of, 465. 

pagan, 131. 

page, 387. 

Palatal series of articulations, 91. 

Pali language, 225. 

Papuans, language of, 339. 

parchment, 180. 

Parsis, aud their language, 222-3. 

Passives, origin of, in Indo-European 
language, 208. 

Past time, Indo-European verbal forms 
indicating, 267-8. 

Pazend language, 223. 

Pegu, language of, 336. 

Pehlevi language, 223. 

Permian language, 309. 

Permutation of consonants in Germanic 
languages, 97-8. 

Persian or Iranian branch of Indo- 
Huropean languages, 192, 198, 222-4, 

Person, verbal endings of, their origin, 
75, 266-7, 303, 319; their loss in 
English, 75-7; they distinguish gen- 
der in Semitic, 303; double form of 
first person in Polynesian languages, 
339. 

Pern, its culture, 347; its mode of writ- 
ing, 450. 

Peshito, Syriac Bible-version, 298. 

Petra, inscriptions of, 299. 

petroleum, 146. 

Phenician language, 294-5, 297; alpha- 
bet of, 461-2; its diffusion, 462-3. 
Phonetic change, 27-31, 42-3, 51, 69- 
98; how brought about, 28, 42, 69; 
most rife in compound forms, 70; 
aids the constructive processes of 
language, 738-4; its destructive ac- 
tion, 74-87; conversion of sounds 
into one another, 87-94; this deperd- 
ent on the mode of physical produe- 
tion of sounds, 87-91; its causes only 
partially explainable, 95-7 ; permuta- 
tion of consonants, peculiar phonetie 
change in Germanic languages, 97-8. 

Phonetic principle in writing, its de- 
velopment in Egyptian writing, 454; 
its introduction into Chinese, 156; 
phonetic cuneiform, 460; steps of 


INDEX. 


development of a purely phonetic 
alphabet, 460-63. 

Phonetic spelling for English, 467-70. 

Vhrases, formation of, 116. 

Physical causes, their effect on Jan- 
cuage, 138, 152-3. 

Physical evidence of race, compared 
with linguistic, 8370-82, 37. 

Physical sciences, analogies of linguis- 
tic science with, 46-7, 52. 

Physical structure of men does not de- 
termine their language, 871-2. 

Physical terms converted to intellectua! 
and moral, 111-13. 

Pieture-writing, 450-53; its analogy 
with onomatopoetic speech, 451. 

Plan of this werk, 8-10. 

-ple, 62 

plense, 113. 

Plural, irregular and regular in Eng- 
lish, 78-9, 82-3; in Indo-European 
language, "972-3: in Seythian, 319; 
pluralizing words in Chinese, 335. 

Polabian language, 214. 

Polish language, 191, 214. 

Polyuesia, languages of, 337-40. 

Polvsynthetic structure of American 
languages, 348-9; of Basque, 354; 
traces of it in Hungarian, 349; poly- 
synthetic class, 363. 

pono (Latin), derivatives of, in Eng- 
Nish, 120-21. 

Pooh- pooh theory of origin of lan- 
guage, 426, 

Portuguese language, 189, 219. 

possess, 112. ° 

ean ease in English, 77, 82, O74. 
ost, 107. 

Pott, Professor A. I’., referred to, 5. 

Prakrit eo 225. 

preach, 

Prefixes, nde rarity in Indo-European 
language, 292; their prevalence in 
Polynesian, 339 ; in African, 344-5. 

Prepositions, in Indo- European lan- 
guage, 274, 276, 292. 

Present tense in Indo- aropean lan- 
guage, special theme of, 269. 
riest, 102. 

’rocess of linguistic growth, what it is, 
154. 
Processes of linguistic growth— see 
Jhange, linguistic. 

Pronominal roots, Indo-European, 258- 
9; whether primitive, 261. 

Pronouns, their nature, 258; derivation, 
in Indo-Kuropean language, 258-9 ; 
declension, 275; part plaved by pro- 


nouns in form- making, 266, 271, 290, 


50] 


303, 319; pronouns as evidences o1 
Indo-European unity, 194; exainy lea 
196. 
Proper names, derivation of, 105. 
propose, 112. 
Provencal language, 164, 218, 219 
Punic language, 297, 298, 
Pushto language — see Afghan. 


Q. the letter, derivation of, 465, 466. 

queer, 113. 

Quippos, Peruvian substitute for writ 
inv, 450. 


R, the letter, derivation of, 465. 

Rabbinic Hebrew, 297. 

Race, relation of language to, 14, 160- 
G1 371-2; value of language as evi- 
dence of, 3870-76, 381. 

Races, different advantage gained from 
language by, 446-7. 

Rask, ” Professor Rasmus, referred to, 5. 

Rate of linguistic change, its variety 
and the circumstances affecting it, 
31-2, 137-9, 148-53. 

read, 80. 

Reason and instinct, 438-9. 

red tape, 125. 

Reduplication, in Indo-European verb 
267-8; in Polynesian, 338-9. 

Reflectiveness, different degrees of, in 
the processes of word-making, 40-41, 
50-51, 121-4. 

Reflexive or middle forms of Indo- 
European verbs, 268. 

reign, 468. 

Relational and auxiliary words, 117-20; 
in monosyllabic langu uages, 335-7. 
Relationship, names of, as signs of In- 
do-European unity, 195; examples, 

196. 

Relative words, 

reliable, 40-41. 

Renan, M. Ernest, referred to, vii. note, 
177 note, 284-6. 

reproach, 113. 

Rheto-Romanic language, 189, 218. 

right, 115. 

Rig-Veda, 226. 

Romaic, or Modern Greek, language, 
221. 

Romanic languages, their origin, 165-8, 
189; age, literature, etc., 218-19 ; 
futures of, 118. 

romantic, 131. 

Roots, monosyllabic, the germs of Indo. 
European language, 255-66, 270-86; 
their sufficiency, 257; their divi isiow 
into pronominal and verbal, 258--9 


their derivation, 114. 


502 


261; examples, 259; their signifi- 
cance, 259-60, 285; how far abso- 
lutely primitive, 261-4; difficulties 
and objections answered, 256-7, 260- 
66, 279-85; development of inflective 
speech from them, 266-77, 286; roots 
at the basis of all linguistic develop- 
ment, 289, 397; triliteral Semitic 
roots, 301; fixedness of Scythian 
roots, 317; roots of Polynesian lan- 
guage, 338: of Egvptian, 342; roots 
of Chinese and other monosyllabie 
languages, their words also, 330-32, 
334-7; various treatment of roots, in 
languages of different structure, 360; 
futility of comparison of roots of dif- 
ferent families, 392-4; roots, how 
originated, 426-34; of what charac- 
ter and office, 423-6; their scantiness 
at the outset, 434. 

rubber, 130. 

Russian language, 191, 214; its syn- 
thetic character, 281. 

Ruthenian language, 214. 


-s, as ending, in English, of third per- 
son singular present of verbs, 63, 93, 
267; of possessive case, 82; of plu- 
ral, 82.. 

Sabean language, 299. 

Sabellian or Sabine language, 220. 

Samaritan language, 297. 

Samoyedic branch of Scythian lan- 
guage, 809-10. 

Sanskrit language, 150, 192, 225-9; its 
intrusion into India, 201; its impor- 
tance to Indo-European philology, 4, 
228-9. 

Santal language, 327. 

Sassanian inscriptions, 223. 

Scandinavian group of Germanic lan- 
guages, 188, 210, 212. 

Schlegels, the brothers August Wilhelm 
and Friedrich von, referred to, 5. 

Schleicher, Professor August, quoted or 
referred to, vi., 47 note, 163 note, 200, 
203, 214 note, 272 note, 303 note, 331 
note; his system of morphological 
notation explained, 364-7. 

schooner, 38. 

Science of language —see Linguistic 
science. 

Scythian or Altaic family of languages, 
308-21, 824-28; its branches, their 
age and literature, and history of the 
races speaking them, 308-15; uncer- 
tainty of the tie connecting them, 
815-16, 320-21, 324; churacteristic 
atructural features, 316-20. 


INDEX. 


second, 108-9. 

Semitic alphabet, 461-3. 

Semitic family of languages, 234, 294. 
308; its branches, their age and lit- 
erature, and history of the races 
speaking them, 294-300; character- 
istic structural features, 300-306, 360- 
61; triliteral roots, 301-3; internal 
flexion, 801, 361; conjugati m, 303, 
declension, 304; syntax, 304; stiff 
ness of meaning and persistence of 
form in Semitic words, 304-5; as- 
serted connection, with this family, 
of Egyptian and other African dia- 
lects, 306-7, 343; of Indo-European 
family, 307, 394. 

Semivowels, 91. 

Servian language, 191, 214. 

seren, 196. 

Shah-Nameh, Persian epic of Firdusi, 
223, 325. 

shall and will, 86, 118. 

Shelter, analogy between language 
and, 401-3: 

Shemitic family — see Semitic. 

Shi-King, Chinese classic, 332. 

-ship, 60. 

Shoshonee language, 350. 

Siamese language, 336. 

Sibilants, 91. 

Sigismund of Germany, as language- 
maker, 36. 

Signification of words, changes of, 100- 
123. 

Silent letters in English words, 28. 

Sinai, inscriptions of, 299. 

Sioux language, 350. 

Siryanian language, 309. 

sister, 387. 

Skipetar language — see Albanian. 

slave, 131. 

Slavic or Slavonic branch of Indo- 
European languages, 191, 213-15. 

Slovakian language, 214. 

Slovenian language, 214. 

smith, 105. 

Smith, 105. 

Smithsonian Institution, 353. 

Social nature of man, relation of speech 
to, 403-5, 440-41. 

Sonant and surd letters, 91; their ex: 
changes, 92-3. 

Sorbian language, 214. 

sound, 387. 

Sounds, articulate — see Articulate. 

South-African family of languages 
344-5. 

sovereign, 468. 

spake, 29. 


INDEX. 


Spanish language, 189, 219; German 
and Arabic elements in, 168 

Spirants, 91; their derivation, 92. 

sptrit, 112. 

splish, 425. 

State languages, so called, 363. 

Steinthal, Professor H., referred to, Wie; 
338 note, 367, 445 note, 450 note. 

Structure, characteristic, of different 
families of language, 291-4, 357-69. 

Study of language —see Linguistic 
science. 

subject, 112. 

Subjunctive mood, origin of, 268; loss 
of, in English, 86-7. 

substantial, 112. 

Substantive verb, derivation of, 115; 
wanting in Semitic, 304. 

such, 57. 

Suffixes, how produced, 57-64; their 
universal presence in Indo-European 
words, 65, 292; primary and second- 
ary, 255. 

sun, 103-4. 

Suras, language of, 327. 

Surd and sonant letters, 91; their ex- 
changes, 92. 

sure, 111. 

Swabian dialect of Old High-German, 
211; of Middle “ligh-German, 163, 
212. 

Swedish language, 2/2. 

Swift, Dean, caricature of etymological 
processes by, 389-90. 

sycophant, 130. 

Syllabic modes of writing, 460-61. 

Syllable, nature of, 89. 

Symbolism, signs of, in Semitic word- 
formation, 302; in beginnings of 
speech, 430. 

Symbols, forerunners of writing, 449. 

sympithy, 112. 

Synonymous words, 110. 

Syriac language, 294, 297, 298, 306; 
alphabet, its diffusion, 313, 462. 

Syro- Arabian family — see Semitic. 


Talmuds, 298. 

Tamil language, 326. 

Tamulian languages, 326. 

Targuins, 208. 

Tartaric or | ataric family — see Scyth- 
ian. 

Tartar and Tatar, 38. 

Technical vocabularies, their relation 
to a language, 19, 23, 158. 

telegram, 40. 

telegraph, 83, 146. 

felinga or Telugu language, 826. 


863 


Tens.s, development of Indo- European, 
266-70; Semitic, 303; Scythian, 3203 
modern preterits in Germanic lan- 
guages, 79-82, 117; English perfects 
and futures, 117-19; Romanie fu- 
tures, 118. 

Terminology, artificial production of a, 
122. 

-th, ending of third person singular 
present in English verbs, 63, 93, 267. 

-th, noun suftix, 64. 

than, 115. 

thank, 111. 

that, pronoun, 430. 

that, conjunction, 114. 

the, 114, 115. 

thou, 196. 

Thought, relation of language and, 403- 
21; the two not identical, 405-11; not 
coterminous, 411; how far thought is 
carried on in language, 412-13; its 
processes aided by speech, 417-21; 
such thought as ours only made pos- 
sible by expression, 420; insufticieney 
of language as expression of thought, 
20, 109-11, 406-7. 

three, 196. 

throng, 262. 

Dae of Rome, as language-maker, 
36. 

Tibetan language, 337 

Time, peculiar treatment of, in Semitic 
verb, 303. 

to, infinitive sign, 119. 

topgallantsails, 72. 

Tradition, the means by which a lan- 
guage is kept in existence, 23; its 
detects, and their consequences, 27- 
32; causes aiding its strictness, 148- 
51; tradition of speech and knowl- 
edge tovether, 441-5; its guiding in- 
fluence on the mind, 445-6. 

Triliterality of Semitic roots, 301-3. 

Troubadours, songs of, 218. 

true, 64, 179. 

truth, 64. 

Tudas, language of, 327. 

Tulu language, 326. 

Tungusic branch of Seythian language, 
312. 

Turanian family. so called, 309; origin 
and first application of the name, 325. 

turkey, 130. 

Turkish branch of Scythian language, 
191-2; divisions, age, literature, ete., 
310-11, 313-14; characteristic struct- 
ural features, 198, 318-20. 

Turkomans, language of, 311. 

two, 196. 


504 


U, the letter, derivation of, 465. 

Ugrian, or Finno-Hungarian, branch of 
Scythian language, 309, 820, 361; 
ave, literature, etc., 314. 

Vigur Turkish language, 311, 313; al- 
phabet, 313, 462. 

Ulfilas, Gothic bishop, 213. 

Umbrian language, 165, 220. 

understand, 113, 133. 

Unity of the human race, not demon- 
strable by evidence of language, 
383-94. 

Ural- Altaic family — see Scythian. 

Urdu language, 224. 

Usage, the sole standard of correct 
speech, 14, 32, 36-40, 128; good and 
bad usage, 16-17, 22. 

Usbeks, language of, 311. 


Ae letter, derivation of, 464, 465, 

66. 

Value of language, 440-47. 

Variety of expression for same thought, 
407-9. 

Variety of human races, not demonstra- 
ble by evidence of language, 384-5. 

Vater, referred to, 4. 

Vedas, Hindu scripture, and their lan- 
guage, 225-7. 

Vei language and alphabet, 346. 

vend, 262 

Vendidad, geographical notices in, 201 
note. 

Verbal roots, 259. 

Verbs and verbal forms, their develop- 
ment in Indo Europ’an languages, 
266 -70; Semitic verb, 803; Scythian, 
319-20; Polynesian, 358; question 
whether verbs or pouns are earliest, 
423-6. 

verity, 178. , 

viz., 459. 

Vocabulary, different extent of, in per- 
sons of different age and condition, 
18-20; changes of, 25-7; its increase, 
25-6, 41, 189; its reduction, 27, 98- 
100, 139; impregnation with fuller 
knowledge, 123, 141; enrichment by 
borrowing, 143-5. 

Vocabulary, English, its extent, 18; 
part of it used by different classes, 
18-20: found in Shakspeare and 
Milton, 23; its changes, 25-7, 140-47. 

Vocabulary, prititive Indo-European 
attempted restoration of, 20/-6. 

Voice, as means of expression 421-3. 

Volga, Mongol tribes on, 312. 

Volscian language, 220. 

Voltaire on etymology, 386. 


INDEX. 


Vowel and consonant, relation of, 89 
oI: 

Vowels, changes of value of, 94-5; 
classification and harmonic sequence 
of, in Scythian languages, 318; im- 
perfect designation of, in some alpha- 
bets, 461-3. 


W, the letter, derivation of, 466. 

Wallachian language, 189, 218. 

was, 115. 

Wedgwood, Professor H., referred to, 
vi. note. 

Welsh language, 190, 217-18. 

which, 57. 

who, relative, 115. 

whole, 242. 

will and shall, 86, 118. 

Woguls, language of, 309. 

women, 468. 

Words, mere signs, not depictions of 
ideas, 20-22, 32, 70-71, 111; the sole 
tie between words and ideas a mental 
association, 14, 32, 409; words poste- 
rior to the conceptions they repre- 
sent, 125-6, 411-12; their value to 
us dependent on conventional usage, 
not etymology, 14, 128-9, 132-4, 404, 
409; how far we think in or with 
words, 410-20; word-making a his- 
torical process, 126-9; history of 
words, why studied, 129; linguistie 
science founded on their study, 54-5, 
its method, 238-9, 247-8; words 
made up of elements originally in- 
dependent, 55-67; their phonetic 
changes, 69-98 ; their changes ot 
meaning, 100-121; identity of words 
and roots in monosyllabic languages 
330-31. 

work, 30. 

Wotiak language, 309. 

Writing, auxiliary and complement 
of speech, 447; parallelisms between 
its origin and history and those 
of speech, 448, 449, 451, 453, 456 
457, 458, 459; desire of communica- 
tion its primary impulse, 448; not at 
first connected with and subordinated 
to spoken language, 449; its forerun- 
ners aud historical beginnings, 449- 
50; picture-writing, 450-52; hiero- 
glyphs, 452 seq.; Egyptian writing 
452-5; Chinese, 455-9; cuneiform 
459-60; syllabic, 460-61; Semitic or 
Phenician, 461-3; Greek and its 
derivatives, 463 seq. ; Latin, 468 
Eniglish, 466. 

wrong, 113. 


INDEX. 505 


wrought, 30, 111. Yukagiri language, 330. 


X, the letter, derivation of, 466. Z, the letter, derivation of, 436. 
Zend-avesta, 201 note, 222. 
Y, the letter, derivation of, 464, 466 Zend language, 150, 922. 


Yakut language, 310-11. Zingian family — see South-African 
Yamato, Japanese dialect, 328. Zoroaster, 222. 
7e, you, 80. zounds, 277. 


Yenisean language, 355. Zulu language, 344-5. 


<= ~ 


The Me os 
EOE EN 


oe UP 
et, 
> a 


ee ae 
‘ 


ee 


Seeley eS ee ris 
> a 4 


cd ror 
w= a ee 
(oe thes 


ee Pe 


a 


% 
“ek 


ns. 
i 
Peri 
- Ur 
weg 
3 
5. 
a 
« : - 2 pea: 
. ; 
ig Va? Pa 
= ‘ v , : 
: ¥ 
r, ar 
: 4 Pere 
7 ‘ * peri 
3 7 
‘ s + — 
. rr 
: 
: , 
ye ne 5 ; at 
Ky ee 5 ‘ 4 
ale «pW <i iad : \ ' 
Z 4 -. » t ° 
= 4 =, = ; : ; hs 
. « 
‘ * : F . Be Ci.) 
‘ 
Si a mm ' « 


@ ’ : 
> — wah val ~ , 
a _ Ey! </>.) - 
» ¢ 44 ; 
pa Ge 4 rT 
oth , 2 — | % » 
~—= - 
U) " ’ 7. i tj : 
. on \ee ay. “as S 
s a i ee 
.¢ a . ¢€ a". bt 
we Po > ( 
te ; re ee | 
i ® to; j 
7 < 
f iy the: ~~ 
' eae a EE 
a > ’ 
¢ 7 it bn ; 
: : re, oS + 
. = a bd 4) 
= Rink eee 2 


ves Md .... 


eee or 
Wt eee 


DATE DUE 


ns 


a 
ww 
- 
2 
4 
os 


Q 
4 
° 
J 


as . 

eienie 

| 
; 


sha 
mallag 
e -_ 
& 
wt 
: 


P121 .W62 
Language and the study of language 


Princeton Theological Seminary—Speer Library 


1 1012 00055 0519 


